If there are so many choices on the American school lunch menu why are many children still leaving the lunchroom hungry? Does it take a child's liberties away to offer just one choice and encourage them to eat that meal served in front of them?
This is what happens daily in a French school lunch room.
Perhaps this only one choice works in France because the French are experts at l'éducation au goût (taste education).
Bon soir, great comments...been enjoying reading them all. Just one observation, as an American (and health professional)....the statistics are sometimes hard to interpret and understand because the terms for overweight, obese and morbidly obese are not understood by everyone. I can attest, from summers in New Jersey, is not so much the overweight kids nor even obese (>30% of normal body weight), BUT it is the high numbers of morbidly obese kids and adults that are eye-opening. I see it face on on the beaches at the Jersey Shore. It always breaks my heart because these cases are difficult to overcome without major intervention.
One last point, I just published another article today about the vegetarian issue in France for school lunches. It is a backward thinking policy at the minimum. Here is a link to the article. "French School Lunch Compared to American School Lunch: Vegetarianism" What could be interesting to look at in the article is the link I put in for a 'revue de presse.' Articles discussing the vegetarian school lunch issue in France. Some articles in English, most in French. Even Sir Paul McCartney got on the bandwagon about the vegetarian issue in French schools (see the revue de presse). I know of one mom who 5 kids are vegetarian and eat in the cantine at my kid's school. Actually some of her kids have now reverted to eating meat because they have to eat something for lunch and they just readopted the meat eating diet again. On another note also, in Pau I know they have an alternate menu option for children who do not eat pork for religious reasons. It is stated clearly on the menu. I think we are lucky in Pau...
I'll try to throw a spanner in the works for good reason. the comparison began with USA/France. I know all too well that the WHO body mass index shows children in the USA are increasingly overweight, but at the same time the USA has some of the most health conscious people in the world. Many of the best diets come from there, the condition of sports people is usually unimpeachable, etc, etc. France has healthier children statistically, but eating habits are changing, hence the 10% of overweight children when data was collected a couple of years ago. The UK has been introduced into this thread and they seem to have taken the American way of eating on board plus an increase in the worst of what was already there and some individual cases are far worse than American kids... Nearby we have Germany where there was an obesity problem in the 1970s that was always being discussed, usually over dinner. There the habits of large parts of the nation changed and they slimmed down. The two parts were reunified and up went the body mass index figures again. The people of former East Germany who had been kept slim suddenly had access to every imaginable excess and they 'blossomed'.
One could stick their head into the WHO website and look at the stats and do this kind of thing over and over again. Sure, I would say that in general French diets can be far healthier than others. But then too many people do not eat enough fresh vegetables and fruit, indeed I find the variety on offer depressingly poor in the SW. Things like fois gras which are potential killers if overeaten, which few people actually do, are not a positive part of the French diet. However, despite the number of households now buying pre-prepared food as a time saver, in general there is far less than most other places I know and some of the pre-prepared food is far better than the quality elsewhere. Some not.
As for school meals. I think from what I have seen, particularly from Tracy, my daughters are at a school that should hang its head in collective shame - or perhaps we might let the mairie do that.
I am not for one second suggesting the diet for children in all schools in the UK is better...but the children are allowed to follow their religious diets or be vegans or vegetarians in the UK. I was frankly horrified when I saw Jamie Oliver improving school lunches in the UK 7 or 8 years ago...and mothers feeding their very overweight children chips and burgers through the bars of the school playground. As a mother my children were not allowed to dismiss any food...without trying it first, and they all ate a good healthy diet. We have always had salad with lunch and dinner regardless of what else is on offer. I have French neighbours and friends and have been shocked at their common use of preprepared foods, I thought that was far more common in the US and UK. All of our meals are prepared from scratch with fresh ingredients....but I maintain children should have the option of a vegetarian or halal diet if required. Children grow up big and strong and usually more healthy when they have always followed a vegetarian diet. Vegetarians according to most statistics live longer.
And although we don't have coca-cola and mars bar/twix machines in our schools and nor do they get pasta or chips or industrial pizza 5 days a week, going by the obesity-in-young people statistics we may have plenty to worry about: according to ENHIS (subdivision of the WHO) 10% of French 11 year-olds are overweight. That said, the percentage in the UK is a lot higher.
The problem is really that individual dietary requirements (kosher/halal/vegetarian etc) can't be catered for by the institution whereas medically required diets can. People are allowed to go home/out for lunch or have a packed one. And école it is more of a problem than in collège or lycée.
When it comes to the quality of the food, certainly in collège and lycée I think you'll find that school lunches are actually perfectly healthy and balanced (not to mention planned by a nutritionniste and the cook) in that there is a choice of entrée (almost invariably crudités) a main course which is meat/offal/fish/shellfish with vegetables and a starch of some sort, and again there is a choice of 2; then cheese and/or pudding which may well be a yoghurt, and there is always fruit available and most of them eat it. Nobody forces them to.
The British VIth formers who have an exchange withmy local Lycée are always amazed at how much better lunch is and they come from a very socially advantaged grammar school in Gloucestershire.
It may seem odd to you as a British person but our main meal is lunch, for supper we are quite likely to have something light eg a vegetable soup and a plain yoghurt.
Also for what it is worth my (French) GP is vegetarian but his children aren't. I think we eat a lot more raw salady things ON AVERAGE here than people do in the UK.
Ive been reading this thread, as like Mary am a health professional with a longstanding interest in dietetics. I cannot believe that France is so many years behind....all this rubbish about children having to eat meat, what is scarey is that the medical profession actually believe this rubbish, which shows a huge lack of reading up on the subject...they are just regurgitating what they learnt at their mothers knee. What if any rights do children have in France. I became involved in SFN some time ago when the thread that took my interest at the time was Catharine talking about her children who had been physically punished by a teacher...cant remember if that was a smack or kick...but really? France is a first world country treating children as if they were in the third world.
That's part of it Véronique, when I found out I was shocked that cultural and religious options are not included and the medical grounds must be prescribed by a doctor and that needs to be renewed each school year.
& now I think of it - I was at an EN training session a couple of weeks ago where I learnt that ONLY dietary requirements on medical grounds can be catered for, by law. So there is no legal obligation to provide vegetarian/Kosher/Halal options. I had thought it would have been negotiable but actually not.
There should also (acc to the law) be a commission cantine in every école primaire and it the job of the parent delegates to push for canteen reform, whether it be rules or food - the Maire is personally answerable to the parents d'élèves for this so it is worth complaining in a constructive & tactful way (or if you have our Maire you get 'Oh we don't HAVE to provide lunch you know!" ditto for the garderie du matin/du soir) it isn't an Education Nationale matter. At primary level the Commune is responsible, for Collège it is the Département and for Lycées it is the Région.
That is absolutely spot on Véronique. The food is brought in from the place where it is actually cooked, the cook and her helpers do not really cook anything but simply make up the dishes such as salads.
The mairie, the town council itself and an old well established group of people who run the town were actually quite happy to see the back of the previous head who would have intervened in the punishments, kept an eye on quality control and so on. The people at the mairie supervising, in other words writing and ordering, what is on the menu simply have no vision whatsoever and are so entrenched in cost cutting so that money can be spent on other things that the decline over the last two years has got to people whose children have been there three or more years. In one a half years my daughters will both be out and on to college, but I hope things genuinely improve for following waves of children.
School cantines vary enormously in that some are run by proper cooks who make almost everything fromscratch (and willvary in how good they are as cooks) and others have bought into the central cantine + reheat at school overhead-cutting system.
Examples: My children's école primaire in the village had an excellent cook (I turned up one day with forgotten sports kit & she was making the pastry for the tarte au chèvre) but she retired and as she was a mairie employee she has been replaced by someone who is nice enough (& has the food safety etc qualifications) but is NOT a good cook.
In primaire in town my daughter's not very imaginative meals come from a central industrial kitchen and are then reheated and unsurprisingly they are not as good. They were probably better first time around.
My children in collège & lycée are lucky enough to have on-site proper cooks and have very good meals and my colleagues eat in the lycée canteen saying that while it is of course collectivité food, it is very good for what it is. The kitchens at the lycée make meals for 1500 people with a choice of 2 or 3 entrées, 2 main courses, cheese and pudding and fruit.
In my own cité scolaire most of my colleagues prefer to bring their own lunch but mainly for time-saving reasons as we get an hour for lunch and there is always stuff to do, people to see.
I think the attitudes to children not eating and being punished must depend enormously on the schooland I think it is écoles which are concerned, not collège or lycée - in primaire the meals are supervised by mairie employees who are often of a certain age and have corresponding attitudes, some understanding and kind, others not. Mairies especially in small villages take whoever they can to do a job with anti-social hours for very little money.
I get in it up to my neck as an advocate for children. My own two eat anything ironically. It is hearing about children being forced to kneel facing the wall for four minutes for not eating something or being told they would get an extra portion of the thing they do not like or punished again I do not like. That is child abuse, nothing else at all. Plus, the refusal to take children's points of view into account goes against the spirit of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to which France is a state party and yet clearly does not practice, which would enable children to express opinions, preferences, etc. Wow, there in Pau seems a millions miles away if preschoolers get salsify and gizzards. Also, perhaps the Welsh Assembly with its fantastic policies on children's rights, education and so on spoiled our two a bit but nearly four years on they remember it very clearly.
Hi Brian, I do not agree at all with punishing kids that do not eat. I do agree with encouraging children to taste, because my experience is that more than often (not always!) after the kids have tasted they will eat the food.
I am sorry that the school your child goes to seems to have mediocre food at the canteen. I believe where we live (in Pau-SW France) the food is quite good at the canteen and the menu is diverse and fresh. However, the menu sometimes contains food that I would never expect three-year-olds and up to eat (gizzard salad, salisif (long radishes) etc).
However my experience as a health professional and mom of four kids is that if kids are hungry they will attempt to try these foods. In a balanced diet, they can be beneficial.
Funny enough, I am writing an article on the subject of vegetarianism in French school lunch program. It is very backward the view on this new law which supports only animal products as sources of protein. Unbelievable. I don’t agree with it but do not see changes in this for a long time. I will publish the article in a few days and will provide a link.
Overall, I have looked at school lunch menus in Albi, Pau, Poitiers, Nice, Nantes compared to typical sized towns and different geographical locations in America. Overall I think I would prefer my child to eat in French school lunch program.
I would encourage you to keep trying with your school-trying to be like a team member for your child to get what he/she needs. I would hope with little compromise on everyone’s part that something can be done to provide your children with a good proper meal.
Thanks for your input.
Hi Brian, I do not agree at all with punishing kids that do not eat. I do agree with encouraging children to taste, because my experience is that more than often (not always!) after the kids have tasted they will eat the food.
I am sorry that the school your child goes to seems to have mediocre food at the canteen. I believe where we live (in Pau-SW France) the food is quite good at the canteen and the menu is diverse and fresh. However, the menu sometimes contains food that I would never expect three-year-olds and up to eat (gizzard salad, salisif (long radishes) etc).
However my experience as a health professional and mom of four kids is that if kids are hungry they will attempt to try these foods. In a balanced diet, they can be beneficial.
Funny enough, I am writing an article on the subject of vegetarianism in French school lunch program. It is very backward the view on this new law which supports only animal products as sources of protein. Unbelievable. I don’t agree with it but do not see changes in this for a long time. I will publish the article in a few days and will provide a link.
Overall, I have looked at school lunch menus in Albi, Pau, Poitiers, Nice, Nantes compared to typical sized towns and different geographical locations in America. Overall I think I would prefer my child to eat in French school lunch program.
I would encourage you to keep trying with your school-trying to be like a team member for your child to get what he/she needs. I would hope with little compromise on everyone’s part that something can be done to provide your children with a good proper meal.
Thanks for your input.
Mary, we had canteen problems recently, staff punishing children for not eating quite severely. So a petition was raised by a mother quite successfully.
The mother gave a copy of the petition to a council member to take to a meeting, because that was the easiest way of getting action immediately and because the canteen belongs to the community rather than the school. I knew the councillor, she is one of the receptionists at my doctor's surgery. Anyway, and at that stage I was unaware of the government legislation which I have now scrutinised, I asked about the food. Because my professional area is childhood studies and especially children's rights I am always at least a bit informed. I have certainly looked at how little child participation there is in matters affecting their lives here. So I naively asked why there were no vegetarian options? The answer came back that experts had advised the government that children up until at least 13 must eat animal proteins. I commented on 'some kind of expert' given that roughly 70% of the world's children live primarily on mainly or entirely vegetarian diets. She retorted with a 'we are not in Africa' comment, then reminded me that she also works for the doctor. So what? But I left that. Also naively, I asked why no sandwiches for the children who do not eat meat. Forbidden, she told me, which I now know. They must go home for lunch. 'What if both parents work?' I asked, 'Then they must eat what they are given'. I added questions about children with special dietary needs such as celiacs, diabetes and so on. She told me that they must have a letter from their doctor to prescribe a special diet and that it was not always permitted even then.
I was a school governor in Wales before we moved to France. All possibilities were accommodated, children shared in menu planning and the children's council approved it a month at a time. Here, we asked for a suggestion box for the children regarding such issues as the canteen excess discipline and what they do not like eating and we were told that they are not mature enough to be entrusted with such things. That is part of what is the answer to your question. The l'éducation au goût is interesting but having asked around a bit I think it is a nonsequitor since schools all over France appear to offer one very mediocre and usually bland choice. The food is below par and is basically any western European standard canteen food that the French should be thoroughly ashamed of. They could do much better on low budgets and as for the strange ideas about obliging children to eat meat and fish, well - no comment.