School Canteens

The Advertiser: Canteens get a health kick :

Jamie Oliver has done a lot to raise our awareness of unemployed youth and the problems they face and how adults need to change to help them. That series was so frustrating to watch but the success stories in that restaurant really were successes. The huge amount of time and effort these kids took was awesome. As for the school canteen series...I well remember school dinners and I am grateful that someone like Jamie has the energy and motivation to get off his backside, do the hard yards and live the changes he envisages. He confronts every difficult issue from the inside and gives up hours of his own time. Yes, he gets fame for it..but he is prepared to take the risks and open his mouth and do something to make things better. My belief is SA has done a lot in school canteens. We had a programme down south trying to help kids who had parents on low or no incomes to have breakfast at school and it was working and the kids were doing better. I believe the government cut the funds. Other people were doing all the work. Our kids are the only thing we can send into the future and we have to look after them. Australia has no excuse. We can grow excellent food. If we eat muck and serve muck then it shows we have no commitment to real food and would rather eat tasteless, bland, mass produced , reconstituted, reheated rubbish. We all have as much pull as Jamie Oliver. He has a programme and can highlight it...but we have mouths and numbers.Supermarkets like Coles and Wooworths have produced magazines with a range of delicious recipes for all budgets and that has had a big impact on how we eat. They have made cooking simply, nutritios meals a piece of cake! The chefs in this article just need to use their clout and power to make changes themselves.Change is action. Change the food at home and the canteen food changes, that's how it's done in SA!! Our kids really take a healthy interest in what they eat and how it helps them. They even take a healthy interest in cooking their own meals. Breaking bread together is as essential as good , healthy food.