Letters

Takeaway school meals

We can do better than that

Mon Aug 28 2023 - 00:07

Sir, – The provision of free books in primary school is most welcome and hopefully will reduce costs for parents, if not address the pressures and inequalities inherent in the “voluntary contribution” system.

I’m not so positive, however, about another major initiative of the Minister of Education, announced earlier this year: hot meals in Deis schools. Schools recognise that many children and young people are now arriving hungry or malnourished.

In emergency accommodation, the parents of 3,500 children are without access to cooking facilities.

The answer, I believe, is not to offer yet more takeaway meals with all the associated waste and distance from good food production.

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If hot food is to be provided at school, then surely we know enough about nutrition and the social and emotional connection between food, care and nurturing to equip and fund schools to have canteens where simple, good food is freshly prepared by adults who have a caring role and children can eat using ceramic plates and real cutlery. Children could have a role in organising clean-up and reuse of these, rather than the discarding and questionable recycling of up to seven pieces of packaging per pupil per day.

Proper time to eat would have to be allowed with supervision by trained childcare workers, probably after instructional time rather than eroding the school day.

We need to take a hard look at inequality and the disenfranchisement of parents in many areas of our extremely prosperous country which has resulted in children coming to school in such a sorry state, and not just nutritionally. But this needs more discussion than this letter allows. However, as a retired principal of a Deis school, one thing I know for sure is that all parents want to feed and nourish their children. Takeaway school meals just aren’t good enough. – Yours, etc,

ANNE McCLUSKEY,

Tallaght,

Dublin 24.