Celebrity chef Darina Allen, who founded the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Co Cork, has told an Oireachtas committee the school meals programme needs to do “much better” when it comes to nutrition.
Ms Allen said there are “very few providers who cook fresh, locally sourced food from scratch” and provide them to schools with no reheating.
“You cannot nourish with profit-based business models that are built on reducing cost and increasing sales ... We welcome universal school meals as progressive policy with the potential to tackle food poverty and promote health equity, but we can do much better,” she told the joint committee on education and youth on Thursday.
“The vast majority of providers do not have cooking facilities but assemble precooked, often ultra-processed components and reheat them in the packaging either in their own facilities, in transit, or on site at schools,” Ms Allen said.
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She said there is a need to “act urgently” on diet-related ill health for children.
“We have a responsibility to ensure that every single school meal not only feeds a child but nourishes them. This is even more important for the child living in deprivation who may have no other access to nutritious food,” Ms Allen said, adding: “It is imperative that we move towards a model based on whole foods cooked from scratch.”
Ms Allen suggested that in the absence of kitchens in primary schools, local community food providers could step in. She gave the example of Duhallow Community Food Services in north Cork, which cooks fresh meals in its kitchen each morning for 29 local schools.
“There are other community food providers around the country doing similar on a small scale and who would like to scale up,” she said.
Others on the panel, such as Naomi Feely, policy director at the Children’s Rights Alliance, said it was of “critical importance” that food provided through the school meals programme is nutritional. There is limited comprehensive data or research on the quality of hot school meals, she noted.
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Nutritional value was also top of the list of concerns for St Vincent de Paul. However, Louise Bayliss, head of its social justice and policy, also pointed to other issues the charity believes requires addressing, such as packaging waste and the hunger children experience during holiday periods off school.
Ms Bayliss said the programme should be expanded to all schools and to children in second-level education.
“Most people will see the importance of the hot school meals programme for the 18 per cent of children experiencing hunger but may question the universal approach,” Ms Bayliss said. She pointed to research in the UK, which has had a targeted free school meals programme for more than 80 years, which shows that many children in need “will forgo their entitlement to a meal because of the stigma associated with the programme”.
“School should be a welcoming and inclusive place, with no child feeling the stigma of poverty.”
Stephen Moffatt, national policy manager at Barnardos, said the parents the charity supports are “overwhelmingly happy with the hot school meals”.
Fine Gael Senator Linda Nelson Murray said the programme was in 36 schools six years ago, and it is now available to 3,200 schools and 500,500 children. “I think fair play that we have that and children are actually getting a meal,” she said.
