THE row over the pathetic state of Edinburgh school children's school dinners has come over a decade too late for our household. In fact, it surprises me that it has taken so long for the controversy to come to the boil.
When the Young Master, now approaching 20, began primary school in Morningside, like many other mothers I paid up for school lunches expecting, naively I suppose, something resembling the school dinners I scoffed back in the dark ages.
You know th
e sort of thing . . . vegetable soup, beef olives and mash, mince and tatties, fish on Friday, sponge puddings with pink custard. Even then we complained. School dinners were there to be lampooned. But we ate them.
I soon discovered that comparing my old dinners with what he was given was akin to the comparison between lunch in The Plumed Horse versus . . . well, words fail me. For I cannot think of any food outlet, no matter how humble, that would have dared to ask for money in return for his lunch box.
To be fair, some hot meals were available for those children who happened to be first in the queue. He never was. Hence he received the cold, packed lunch option. He truthfully reported that he never ate it because it was "yeugh". To my shame I ticked him off and told him not to be so fussy, assuming that it must be at least palatable.
My eyes popped out of my head when I finally saw what I was paying for. A small, unbuttered roll containing processed cheese. A radioactively-pink piece of "cake" that looked and smelled vaguely of bubblegum, and a miniature packet of foul-flavoured crisps.
From that point on, he took his own packed lunch.
Maybe school dinners remained as inadequate right up to the present day. Maybe they improved and then sank again. All I know is that, reading the current reports, they are every bit as bad as they were 15 years ago.
Perhaps they might be consumed and enjoyed by a famine victim who had already resorted to eating their own shoe leather and thus had experienced something to which they would favourably compare.
But the mind boggles at how anyone, let alone someone in catering, could actually turn out these "lunch boxes" with the aim of providing nutrition.
The problem, of course, is budgets. We all know that £1.65, while not a king's ransom, is more than enough to produce a healthy packed lunch. It's when you try to do that commercially, rather than in your own kitchen for your own child, that the sums collapse.
Mum, or dad, isn't being paid to make the sandwiches. They don't have to apportion part of the overhead costs of their kitchen, appliances, and fuel to the lunch box. They can spend every penny of that £1.65 on the actual lunch rather than trying to squeeze and economise on the contents to make themselves look more cost-effective.
In an ideal world the logical answer would be that all parents made their own child's lunch. Sadly, we are far from an ideal world, or ideal parenting, and we know that under those circumstances many kids would go hungry.
The council, and education leader Marilyne MacLaren, can fiddle about with the service and the sums as much as they like, but the plain fact is that there is no alternative to digging deep and spending more . . . lots more.
Most of the money goes on staff, kitchen facilities, distribution, pensions etc. Until more funds are committed and each child gets a lunch that is tasty, appealing, nutritious and healthy, school lunches are not a public service. They are a job creation scheme.
Gravy train rolls onAT least we need have no fear of our politicians going hungry. MPs' expenses are undergoing a long overdue review in order to make them more accountable. Funny how the new proposals don't seem to result in them getting less money. Rather, they will get a nice lump sum instead of running up random bills for "essentials" such as garden furniture and home improvements. Oh, and we are told their claims are to be more transparent.
At least the furore has lifted the lid on the current arrangements, which could only be described as "scams" in comparison with the private sector.
Right now they can still claim £400 a month for groceries. Not content with paying them we have to feed them too! Show me one employee of an independent business who claims his or her grocery bills as justifiable expenses.
And the worst outrage goes on unchecked. MPs will still be able to keep the profits from selling on second homes they bought with public money. Bearing in mind that most second homes are in central London, many of them will be walking away with millions.
The review's a joke. And MPs are still laughing all the way to the bank. But what else did we expect?
The full article contains 838 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
