As part of our work in PSHE, looking at our dream school, we have focussed on the food we eat at lunch time. We have spoken with many people – students, the caterers, teachers and the Principal as well as our parents.
The reason we were doing this was to find out if we could improve the quality of food in the canteen.
We also wanted to make sure that we had enough nutrition in our lunch so we have enough energy to learn in the afternoon.
We began by discussing the problems we saw in the lunchroom and then split into groups – one looked at nutrition, one our favourite foods, one our least favourite foods and one looking at potential menus.
We created questions for a survey. We considered the different methods of cooking – when Ms Anne did not know exactly what was in the back kitchen, we asked to go and look (we enjoyed that).
We then went to speak to the Principal about meals in her previous school (they sounded delicious) and her ideas for a rotating menu.
We then spent lunchtime gathering evidence – so much evidence. After that, we discussed biased data and collation. Collating data simply means putting it into groups and working out what we have between us.
Favourite foods:
We got a lot of answers for this – some were ingredients and some were meals. The top 5 answers were:
Ms Anne said no to all of the sugar and fast food☹ So we kept looking till we found something that did not contain sugar.
We took this information and gave it to the menu group. We then looked at the least favourite foods. These were so many that we could not come up with a top 5. Included were vegetables, sweet things, and carbohydrates.
We also looked at textures to make sure that our food was exciting. The most popular was cold – not many people liked wet.
Menu
When we looked at the menus, we considered that many of us like food from other countries。We knew that there were a few problems for us.
Problem number 1: The catering
We need food that can be prepared off-site, brought at school and served to us.
Problem number 2: the choice
Currently we have a choice of four mains, two sets of vegetables, bread or potatoes and a sweet item. The Principal and Ms Anne suggested that we cut down the number of choices so that the money would go further and we could have better quality and selections. We considered an option of a meat main or the vegetarian version and also a spicy option and a non-spicy option.
We made these suggestions and gave it to the menu group. These are what they came up with:
We are going to meet with the caterers to try and help them make food that we like. We will not change things quickly but we are hoping that they will listen.
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