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The Minutes from your School’s Last Healthy Eating Policy Meeting

“Parents would start trebucheting £1.99 two-piece meals over the fence in protest” – Tom Starkey takes a tongue-in-cheek look at implementing healthy eating standards in schools…

Tom Starkey
by Tom Starkey
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Present: GL – (Deputy Vice Principal) BN RR CL

Meeting held in: RR’s office. Because she has cake.

Item 1 – Chick-chick-chick-chick…

It has been noted that within a two-mile radius around the school there are now 11 fast food establishments.

These include: Chicken Palace, Chicken Castle, Chicka-Chick-Ah!, Licka-Chick-Ah!, Cluck-U-Like, Poultry Offerings and Dave’s Chicken Shed.

(“Ooh, I love Dave’s!” interjects CL at this point. “They’ve got this thing called The Grease Bucket. It’s just the skin. It’s ace.”)

With this influx it seems prudent to promote healthy eating in school to attempt to minimise the detrimental effect that these takeaways may present to the students in regards to diet.

At this juncture it was suggested by BN that this may be something of a tall order when students like Cammy in Y10 sincerely believe that consuming something that isn’t a highly caffeinated green neon sludge or a deep fried mystery meat is akin to the abuse of her human rights.

“I think if someone offered that girl a carrot, she’d stab them with it.” was BN’s prognosis of the situation.

Even so, it was decided, for the sake of the students’ health, (and Cammy’s very-near-future heart problems), that a push on healthy eating was the way forward.

Item 2 – Salad in a bucket?

Making the school cafeteria offerings more appealing to the students was one of the options considered.

“We could put everything in buckets. I love buckets,” suggested CL.

“We could make it not be awful,” was BN’s somewhat out of left field proposal. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I had the tuna bake yesterday; it wasn’t baked properly and I’m pretty sure whatever was in it wasn’t tuna.”

It was decided to expand the salad bar selection and put up posters encouraging healthy eating and exercise, and highlighting the dangers of overconsumption of fried chicken. (I have my suspicions that this was more for the benefit of CL than anyone else.)

Item 3 – Repelling borders

The big question was then addressed: should the upper school students be prevented from leaving school grounds at lunch, thereby minimising the chance that they’d be mainlining hot chicken every day?

“There’d be pushback from the parents,” stated RR. “Cammy’s mum for one would be trebucheting £1.99 two-piece meals over the fence just in case her baby wasn’t getting her usual 18,000 daily calories for a start.”

Even though this was undoubtedly true, it was decided to have a parent consultation about the idea – and with community support, the lunchtime restrictions would come into play at the beginning of the new academic term.

“Erm…these new restrictions,” asked CL, with a distinct look of terror on his face, “would they be applied to the staff as well as the students do you think?”

“Well, I think we could probably do with being role models, so that’d probably be a yes,” admitted GL. On hearing this, CL broke out into a serious meat sweat.

AOB

Staff were tasked with finding out what is in those drinks that Cammy has, and where they can get some.

Meeting adjourned

CL was seen making his way to Dave’s. Possibly to stockpile.

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