Primary School Girl Told To Stop Photographing and Blogging School Meals

JamieKitson writes "British primary school (elementary to those of you in the U.S.) pupil Martha/'Veg' has been taking photographs of her school dinners and writing about them at her blog Never Seconds since April. The blog has become popular, and Martha decided to do something with the popularity: namely, raising money for an international school dinners charity. Unfortunately, the local council, Argyll and Bute, having apparently not heard of the Streisand effect, didn't like the publicity that her blog was generating and have shut her down. They said the blog made the catering staff fear for their jobs. There is a happy ending though: donations have gone through the roof and she has already passed her target."

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[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, you think this [bbcimg.co.uk] looks healthy and tasty? Uh huh...

NeverSeconds

[eternaldoctorwho]

I think it's awesome she named her blog "NeverSeconds". I always remember being left hungry in middle/high school by the paltry lunches we got, to the point where I started bringing in my own every day. The worst was pizza day - you got the equivalent of one piece of pizza, a drink, and a "salad" (actually a couple pieces of lettuce and some shredded carrot). That was it. I guess it all worked out, because after the long lines, including many line-cutters, you only got about 10 minutes to eat anyhow.

My point is: school lunches suck! I fully support this girl in her efforts.

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[TarpaKungs]

Some of it looks OK. Some of it looks utterly dire, even compared to what I was being forced to eat 35 years ago! It's not a patch on what my local school serves my kids (I've eaten 3 meals with them, paid for I should add!) and down in East Sussex, £2 consistently buys a good healthy and tasty meal. I was so impressed I actually emailed the catering company's Regional Manager (Chartwells who are contracted to provide our school dinners) and East Sussex CC (school meals division) and said I thought it was an apt time to praise there efforts - the email was received with some excitement judging by the reply I just got back :) It's very easy to criticise, sometimes the opportunity to praise is overlooked. Back on topic - full marks to Martha aka VEG - trended on Twitter worldwide today, 1000+ comments on the BBC News story, front page on BBC News and Independent news (web editions). And as someone said, it looks like Argyll and Bute Council have reversed their decision - probably because her MSP (Member of Scottish Parliament) who also happens to be the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning told them to! This sort of story warms my heart - thanks to the Internet, a minor coverup of a small time incident[1] that would have never made it past the local paper now becomes a national and international story. [1] This is a fairly minor event in the grand scheme of things, but is rather symptomatic of the "brush under the carpet" attitude of the authorities in the UK - hopefully this particular event will make other authorities sit up and listen.

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[jythie]

It was probably less about the actual content being shared, and more about the lack of editorial control they had over it. For better or worse, knowing everything you do is going to be posted for the public to see has a bit of a 'looking over your shoulder' effect on people since you never know what might go wrong, what could be taken out of context, or what could haunt you if people are unsympathetic to the tradeoffs involved in whatever it is you do.

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[CastrTroy]

I live in Ontario, so all this seems weird to me. We don't have school lunches in grade schools. Parents pack a lunch for the kids. I've always thought it was odd that kids got cafeteria meals in grade school. Even in highschool, we had a cafeteria, but still most kids brought their own lunch anyway. Most people's lunches consisted of a sandwich, some fruit, a juice box, and many of us even had some kind of snack like fruit roll-ups (always hated these) or something like a twinkie. Still it seemed like we were much better fed than the fries burgers and pizza that kids get in their cafeteria lunches. Now that my kids are at school, they still bring in their own lunches, but the school frowns upon bringing things like twinkies. Although to tell the truth, most granola bars aren't much healthier anyway. It seems counter productive to have the schools serve lunches if they aren't going to be healthy. Let the parents decide what the kids are going to eat. It only takes 5 minutes to make a lunch for your kids in the morning, and by the time they are 8, they can do it themselves.

The charity

[nozzo]

The best bit about all this is that Martha has raised around 4 times her £7,000 target for the charity she supports. The proudest 9-year-old ever when she comes home from school and finds out!

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[AngryDeuce]

I've always thought it was odd that kids got cafeteria meals in grade school.

It obviously depends a lot on where you live and go to school. I grew up in one of the poorer areas of Philadelphia and the vast majority of the kids I went to school with were latchkey kids in single-parent households (many of whom had younger siblings to care for when they got home, myself included, even in grade school), and I'm betting many of them ate even worse at home, as horrifying as that thought is to me.

I was in the reduced lunch program so my cafeteria meal only cost my mother $0.40 a day each for me and my younger brother, which even brown-bagging it couldn't really compete with cost-wise...

Later, when I was in high school (by that point my mother had married my stepfather who was in the U.S. Army and we were stationed in GA) the lunches were much higher quality than the Philly ones (but my God in heaven did they love their fucking chicken-fried steak, that was served at least once a week, if not more), but the rules on what you could bring were much, much more restrictive. So help you if they caught you drinking a can of soda, even the juices that come in cans like soda would be confiscated. They'd take candy from you if they caught you eating it, which was doubly ridiculous when you consider the fact that they sold candy at the fucking school store. You had to take it directly to your locker after purchase and leave it there or else they would take it. This is high school students we're talking about here, mind you, 18-year-old's getting hassled over Now-and-Laters, it was unreal.

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[MightyYar]

In NYC they shift the school subsidized lunch programs to the city pools in the summer. It's the closest thing to a healthy meal those kids will get.

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[AngryDeuce]

Given the way that some high schools treat their students [like little children] it's no wonder that so many young people today have such a hard time taking care of themselves after they graduate.

If you want to see something truly disturbing, check out the documentary The War on Kids [wikipedia.org]. It is currently available on Netflix; I just watched it a few days ago and was totally disgusted. The section on the over-medication of our children is especially troubling, and the coverage of the full SWAT raid at a South Carolina High School at the behest of the administration [cbsnews.com] (which turned up absolutely no drugs at all) is both infuriating and chilling at the same time.

Much of the documentary focuses on the testimony of kids dealing with the rise in police involvement in our schools, not to mention the ineffectiveness (and outright insanity) of zero-tolerance policies. The kid's themselves know it's a complete joke, all the anti-drug programs like D.A.R.E., plus the teachers talking about kids looking like fucking lobotomy patients after a change in meds, literally drooling...

I can tell you emphatically, there is no way in hell I'm going to allow my child to go to a school that even kids themselves cannot differentiate from a prison (they actually do an experiment with children in the documentary examining just that). I will be home-schooling my children, no matter what it takes. My kids will not be drones. They may not be able to diagram a sentence, but they'll damn sure know their rights.

Re:U turn

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't seem to refute the basis of the story at all.

It just says "we used the term 'forced' and we actually meant 'recommended' instead". But we're talking about an adult and a four year old here. So is there really any difference?

I mean, I guess you could note that they didn't strap the girl down and put the food in her mouth, but no one was suggesting that in the first place.

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[Hyperhaplo]

Same. Although, I soon found out how to make a very very small amount of money stretch really far.

I used to catch the bus. Instead of buying bus tickets I would ride my bike to school and spend 30c? something like that at a fish&chips shop on the way which would usually get me one big or two or three small potato cakes. I realise now that the shop guy was being very nice.

This went on for some time. I never did find out if my mother knew I was riding my bike to school.. in any case, for three years (most of the time) I collected the bus money, caught the bus sometimes, always had a spare book of tickets, and rode or walked whenever I could.

I applaud the girl in TFA. always good to shine a light on the parts of our society the rest of us don't see. Am sure Jamie Oliver is loving this.