School meals

With the new interest in the nutritional quality of school meals, so well awakened by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, tfX is making the exclusion of trans fats from school meals a specific campaign focus.

• Overfed and Undernourished: the Plight of UK Children Today - In the face of the UK's unfolding child nutrition disaster, Jennifer Swift argues the case for serious regulation of our children's food and how it is advertised, including a ban on industrial trans fats. Published in the Church Times, 23 June 2006.
• The School Food Trust is dominated by board members who are either in, or close to, the UK food and catering industry. No wonder then that they are keeping so quiet about trans fats and hydrogenated oils!
• tfX response to "A Framework for Setting Standards for School Food Other Than Lunch" of 6 January 2006. This is the tfX response to a consultation on snack foods in schools. Of course, it mysteriously forgot to say anything about curbing childrens' intake of trans fats.
• The Scottish Free School Meals Campaign campaigns for high quality free school meals in Scotland, to help overcome Scotland's dreadful social, health and nutritional inequalities.
• tfX response to Turning the Tables: Transforming School Food. "This report dismisses the need to take action on trans fatty acids. It does so on the basis of inadequate evidence, guesswork, misunderstood COMA recommendations and apparent ignorance as to the seriousness of the impacts of trans fatty acids on health. This decision to dismiss the question of trans fatty acids and allow our children to be poisoned by them until the matter is revisited in 2011 is ill-informed, irresponsible and severely deleterious to the health of our children and especially those in lower socio-economic groups whose consumption of trans fatty acids is likely to be highest."
• Campaign for trans-free school meals - help us to get the message over to Government: trans fats are toxic, and they must not be allowed in our childrens' school food.
• Turning the Tables: Transforming School Food - Recommendations for the Development and Implementation of Revised School Lunch Standards - public consultation page (10 October 2005). All very laudable - but to bad they have chosen to ignore the entire tfX submission on trans fats.
• The Caroline Walker Trust (CWT) exists to "improve public health through good food", and its nutritional guidelines for school meals and elderly people in care have a quasi-official status. However the guidelines make no mention of trans fats or hydrogenated oils, even though they represent one of the major public health hazards of the modern age.
• DfES School Food Consulation - tfX submission of 29 March 2005. We argue that trans fats should be eliminated from school meals, that saturated fats should be constrained, and that both monounsaturated and polyunsaturated oils, including essential omega-3 and omega-6 oils, should be encouraged. These requirements should be mandatory on all school meal providers.