Martha Payne is a nine-year-old Scottish girl who has made a big impact on the web with the photos on her blog of junk food that she is put on a daily basis at school. This case has led many parents to consider what do your children eat in the school canteen.
In Spain two million children eat daily at school, but there are many differences between the menu of each other. And it is that not all dining rooms have the same control, nor do they offer the same information, nor of course follow the same nutritional recommendations to prepare the children's menu.
With this scenario, it is not surprising that many families prefer their children to eat food at home at school, something that is not always possible.
But, given the doubts we raised in the post about homemade food in school, based on what the Scottish girl hangs on her blog as part of a school project, it is not difficult to overcome in quality that menu they offer in the dining room With the homemade food.
Do parents know what their children eat in the dining room?
Parents who leave their children in the dining room usually have the menu information that your children will eat at school every week, and this can give them some confidence (if there is a varied diet).
Although it is also true that I can be very calm seeing that every day there are “Vegetables” as an accompaniment and it turns out that these vegetables are three slices of dried cucumber like the ones we see in some photograph of Martha Payne. Or that the "Meat" is hamburger and the "Fish" fried wands.
That is why it is good for parents to inform themselves, talk with those responsible for the dining room, with teachers ... and of course also with the children to know as well as possible what foods they eat, how they are cooked, presented ... In any case, the School feeding should be completed with a healthy meal at home, a good breakfast, snack and dinner.
Along with the information on the menu, the school usually returns to the parents a "report" (what I know are some crosses to indicate whether "good", "normal" or "regular") about what the children have eaten in the dinning room.
Having school canteens in the spotlight is not a new issue that has jumped into the media with the case of a Scottish girl's blog. There are many voices that doubt the nutritional quality of what is offered to children in Spanish schools.
A recent study that visited 209 schools in 19 Spanish provinces reported in 2011 that 30% of school menus do not offer vegetables every day and another 20% abuse fried and precooked foods. In general, it was observed that the quality of the menus worsened and one in three had dietary deficiencies.
However, it is difficult to obtain generalized data, and the qualities of the school menu can be very different according to schools even in the same location.
And is that there are no centralized data, there is a great diversity among autonomous communities and also the competences in this matter are divided between Health and Education, which further complicates the unification of criteria.
Main lacks of school menus
There are different works that have approximated the characteristics of school menus in Spain, and from them interesting conclusions are drawn that we have already commented on Babies and more.
According to Jesús Román, of the Spanish Society of Dietetics and Food Sciences, author of the 'White Book of School Feeding', in general the dining room menus lack fruits, vegetables, vegetables and fish; and they have fried and prepared food left over.
The manual 'Nutrition and feeding in the school environment' affects these main errors in the menus of the school, adding in addition the repetition of the same culinary presentations, the shortage of legumes, as well as blue fish.
On the opposite side, there is an excess of sweet desserts, saturated fats and proteins (to the detriment of carbohydrates), to which we must add an imbalance between the energy intake of food from one day to another.
Observing these school menu errors We see that they are not far from the main feeding errors in most families. This indicates that there is little information (or awareness) about the characteristics that it should have and the importance of a healthy menu.
Having seen all this, the importance of the unification of criteria is warned and the need for revision of the regulations and of claim by parents and the same healthier school menu colleges.
