In their attempts to tackle childhood obesity the government and more specifically, the DfES and their proxy the School Food Trust, seem to have fallen foul of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
John Ross, the author who coined the phrase in his 1996 novel, described how it was possible that when implementing a mechanism with a specific positive goal, the whole or part of the outcome was often the opposite of the original intention.
And so it goes with school food – the idea being that banning unhealthy food in vending machines and school canteens would improve students’ diets and help reduce obesity.
Great, except that the Law of Unintended Consequences has already happened with a backlash from parents like Julie Critchlow from South Yorkshire, who see healthy meals and the ‘Jamie Oliver effect’ as an encroachment on their and their children’s civil liberties (‘food is cheaper and better at local takeaways’). Caterers are also complaining that the drop in revenue from vending machines has fundamentally undermined the viability of their contracts.
So, the net result of the activities of Jamie Oliver, the SFT and the ‘school sinner ladies’ (another great headline by the subs at The Sun) has been a 5.35% decline in the number of school dinners and a shrinking pool of commercial caterers prepared to service the market.
Even if Compass Sodhexo and their ilk decide that school contracts are not sufficiently profitable, there will always be suppliers prepared to fill the void. Whether the quality will be what parents expect post Jamie is another issue, with few firms able to turn a pig’s ear into anything but ‘oreille de cochon’, for 50p or less.
Jamie also raised the issue of advertising and found a receptive audience in Mr Blair and co. Unfortunately the government and anti-advertising groups aren’t so keen on looking at Sweden, which also has an obesity problem yet banned all advertising to children under the age of 12 in 1991 - yes 15 whole years ago! Nor does the government want to use France or Denmark’s systems because they cost between £1.50 to £4 per day per student. You don’t need Jamie Oliver, the SFT or a raft of experts to tell you why £4 works and why £0.50 doesn’t, or that it would take more than an extra £489m to fund the difference.
In Italy 36% of students are overweight, in France the number is rising as it is in Japan, Australia, the US, Russia and pretty much everywhere we can find figures (with the exception of Africa). In writing this we found an article by Stockholm Council’s Nutrition Unit, highlighting an issue we have yet to see raised in the current debate – the importance of how meals look. Their research showed that the appearance and price of a meal were far more important to students than its nutritional content.
Even Sweden isn’t far enough to escape the Jamie Oliver effect with the main local newspaper noting that the report was released just a day after the ‘Essex wide-boy chef’ had met with Leif Pagrotsky, Sweden’s Minister for Education, Research and Culture.
Perhaps the moral of this story is that educators and politicians seem to have forgotten that they can’t control free markets in the same way as they can mandate exams and the curriculum. You can encourage kids to eat healthily, but if they don’t want to, and without a far wider approach (including educating parents like Ms Critchlow) then a band aid approach to school meals cannot hope to make a serious impact. Students and their parents will eat what they want, not just what teachers, celebrity chefs, or politicians tell them they should.
In the end there seem to be no clear answers to this problem, but perhaps the greatest unintended consequence of trying to improve school meals is how it shows that when it comes to addressing serious issues like obesity, our current generation of politicians will listen and act on the advice of a media celebrity, after blithely ignoring the advice of their own experts and others who have been saying exactly the same thing for years.
Do no junk food ads and creating lots of hype about schoool meals make children healthier?
