School dinners: looking back on 60 years of the meals you loved to loathe

I loved my school dinners. Not just for the solace of deep layers of mashed potato on the shepherd’s pie, or even for the luxury of a quivering chocolate blancmange, but for the benevolence of the dinner ladies who doled it out. Mrs Rivers, in charge of half a dozen white-aproned cooks, also led the dining room, making sure that the monitors in charge of handing out pudding did so fairly, and that all plates came back licked clean.

I can’t remember exactly how much we paid for our daily dinners, but it was little more than the price of a packet of cheese and onion crisps and a Tunnock’s marshmallow from the tuck shop, the only alternative at a country school, miles from the nearest shop or café. We always knew them as dinners, even though they were taken at lunchtime. The word “lunch” sounding less substantial and I suspect is the reason we always used the D word. For many of the children, particularly those from the travelling community who worked on the local farms, this was their only decent meal of the day and why, I suspected, the dinner ladies laced every meal with a glorious ballast of carbs.

School dinners were a sea of potatoes, pastry and bread. We never had rice, and pasta was confined to macaroni cheese (it was the 1960s after all), but stodge was the order of the day. Thick suet sponge on a rich filling of steak and kidney; fat wodges of jam sponge as thick as a bible, with desiccated coconut and custard and pasties that felt like you had swallowed a brick were just three of the ways they filled us up. Stodge was considered a necessity in what was principally a farming community. Many of us went home not to do homework but to help out on the farm. Meals were high in calories. The dinner ladies knew you couldn’t lift a bale of hay on a plate of salad. There was always more crust than filling to every pie, and a thicker layer of crumble than fruit, but that pleased this hungry boy, for whom starch in any form has always been a good thing.

You could label almost everything we ate as comfort food. Pies, stews, pudding and crumbles. Meat of any sort always appeared with lashings of gravy or juice, which was why many of the meals were served in soup dishes rather than on plates. Irish stew, Lancashire hot pot and chicken stew were shovelled down as quickly as possible, in the hope of seconds, but rissoles – always on the dry side – went down with a bit of a struggle. We never had sausages or fish fingers or chops. Every meal involved a recipe, what you might call “proper cooking” and that was partly why so many of us had a crush on the women who cooked them. They cooked for us, not just handed out food.

Bad days were few, but nevertheless unforgettable. Such sad lunchtimes involved liver (there were tears) slabs of bacon and egg pie (as an egg-hater, I gave mine to the kid with holes in his school pullover) and the dreaded tapioca, which we called “frog spawn” and then, as we reached puberty, something a little more graphic. Gooseberry pie was loathed by many, but was my number-one pudding. Ask me how I want to finish my last meal and I will beg for that, the very essence of summer, with its sugar-dusted pastry and thick layer of sweet-sour filling.

This daily feast came to an end in my final year, when for some reason I spent my dinner money on trips to the tuck shop instead. Suddenly the dinner ladies’ cottage pie was replaced by a bag of salted peanuts and their minced beef swapped for a packet of Twiglets. Junk food had arrived at the tuck shop in the form of roast chicken crisps and chocolate mini-rolls. There were bags of toffees and fizzy pop. A packet of Refreshers is not lunch and never should be, but at that point the fizz of the pastel-coloured sherbet tablets on your tongue felt new and exciting. Each lunchtime I walked the walk of shame past the dining room windows and the benevolent ladies I once worshipped. A good solid dinner abandoned for a packet of Wotsits. Shame indeed.

When asked what British schoolchildren might one day eat, Nicole Pisani rattles off a list that ranges from attainable to futuristic: “Alternative proteins using local suppliers; vegetables grown vertically by students; carbon negative baguettes; insect pancakes and soylent [complete meal] green soup; schools that buy whole animals and promote nose-to-tail eating; schools which are totally vegetarian; and last but not least, a few robots making packed lunches.”

Pisani is co-founder of Chefs in Schools, a charity on a mission to improve how British children eat, with fresh food cooked on-site and from scratch in school kitchens. Some of her vision for the future is already being realised. At Christ’s College Finchley, head chef Amber Francis – who was crowned Champion of Champions in this year’s Great British Menu – serves meat or fish just two to three times a week, but buys better-quality produce when they feature. She also batch-cooks; last year, for example, she bought 3kg of second-grade wild garlic from organic supplier Natoora for pesto, which she froze for the next term.

But there’s still a way to go. The quality of food served in a school canteen is directly proportional to the quality of its ingredients, and the procurement of those ingredients is a big piece of the puzzle. Chefs in Schools advocate that less is better. “Maybe we can’t have bread made with regeneratively farmed flour for every sandwich,” says chief executive Naomi Duncan, “but if we use it enough, we create demand.”

That can only happen if schools have greater control. Everyone interviewed wants to see all school catering brought in-house in the future. Food campaigner Henry Dimbleby, who led the National Food Strategy in 2021, used to believe better school food was possible under any model, “but I now think there are huge benefits to bringing it in-house, because it comes down to the headteacher caring, and it links up with the culture of the whole school.” About 80% of schools currently outsource catering to privately owned companies. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher introduced compulsory competitive tendering, resulting in a system where the maximum quantity of ingredients are bought for the lowest price, “but we end up buying loads of bad products and then fewer kids take up the meals,” says Duncan, “so it’s a less economically sustainable model.”

Pisani, Duncan and Dimbleby all agree that menus should be integrated with the curriculum. In future Dimbleby would like “Schools where teachers eat with students, often family-style; where children thrive not just because they’re nourished but because there’s social cohesion; where the food reflects the cultures in the school; where cookery lessons are given to kids up to the age of 14; where they in some form grow food and understand the connection between that and eating, so later in life they have the knowledge to enjoy one of the great creative human pursuits, which is cooking.”

Francis agrees. “School canteens are often places where learning stops for the day,” she says. She has introduced Try Something New Tuesdays to expand her students’ understanding of ingredients, such as globe artichokes, winter tomatoes and miyagawa satsumas. She also spotlights producers from whom she sources, on posters explaining where the ingredients kids are eating come from and how they are grown.

Pisani anticipates school menus that “embrace the rich diversity of our population”. Duncan says that this should be a mandatory requirement, not limited to events like Black History Month. She would also like to see the role of school chef endowed with greater importance, as the people responsible for powering children through their day and setting them up with tastes and skills for a lifetime.

Lots needs to change, but it’s not reinventing the wheel. “I hope the future of school food looks more like the past,” says Duncan, “using whole, fresh ingredients that are cooked from scratch.” Before the burgers and chips of her school days, before Thatcher’s 1980 Education Act, which removed all prior nutritional standards, there were the 1970s. “I think most people who ate school dinners in the 70s might have felt like they were eating stodgy puddings,” Duncan remarks, “but at least those stodgy puddings were homemade with love.”

Visit the exhibition on school dinners at the Food Museum in Suffolk, until 25 February 2027 (foodmuseum.org.uk)

Timeline by Michael Segalov