The Depressing Brutal Reality of $3 School Lunches
To "save money" the government has awarded the school lunch contract to a company that has a paragraph in the Wikipedia entry titled '2013 horse meat scandal'
This past week I have experienced something truly dread friends, I, Daniel Vernon, gave David Seymour the benefit of the doubt.
Seymour On Tuesday, announced the new school lunch menu, which he said would save the Government over $100 million annually, the press was invited to try the food, and many puff pieces were written about the food, its texture, and whether or not they’d choose to eat it. Seymour said it would cost $3 a meal to produce, taking a heavy burden off the taxpayer and government debt, it was widely touted as a win for Seymour.
And I’ll admit, I thought it seemed good, and I was glad that we could keep the program because feeding children so they have better learning outcomes should be a bipartisan priority.
But I kept thinking, $3 a meal seems a bit too cheap, and the whole roll-out event seemed very PR friendly, the reporting was soft, and Seymour seemed a bit too into the food, overselling it a bit. I mean at $3 a meal, is cheap, what are they putting in there, horse meat? hahaha
OH GOD NO I WAS JOKING. WHAT.
Yep, Compass Group, the multinational food service company that has been awarded the contract to lead the new healthy school lunches programme, quite famously “unknowingly supplied concealed horse meat in food products to a "small number" of schools in Northern Ireland” - I got that quote from a Wikipedia paged simply titled: 2013 horse meat scandal.
But hey, that was 2013, and over the pond, surely here in NZ, they’ve been supplying quality food that our trusted health professionals would go on record to support!
"Cabinet has given a $85 million contract to a group led by a company that just months ago was forced to do a performance management plan due to poor quality and service," Dr Kelly Garton, HCA spokesperson says.
Yep, in fact, last year alone they were dropped by one-third of the schools they catered, due to complaints about the quality of food, including Waverley Primary School, whose principal Tim Marriott, gave the Sunday Star-Times some examples of the “poor quality and service” that includes:
“The boxes that we were getting with the food were mouldy. It was almost like they'd been kicked around.”
He claimed the meals had hair in them, and, once, a student complained of finding a band-aid in their meal.
So, as Seymour gushed over the food saying such orgasmic quotes as "It is so good. I mean, it's one of the best meals that you're going to have." the reality is that school children, in this country have already had meals from Compass, and “the best meals you’re ever going to have” look like this:
And have been delivered with a little extra “spice” on the lids:
So yeah, of course, $3 a meal is a fucking joke, and corners have and will be cut to feed school children the above, and why? To save $100 mil that couldn’t be found elsewhere, like from the 1.2 billion given to Landlords, or the $216 Million given to BIG TOBACCO.
That’s the real truth, the taxpayer doesn’t benefit from this, it harms their children, and, in some cases has probably cost them their jobs as thousands of jobs are probably going to get cut, as the government chose a huge international consortium famous for serving up horsemeat to school children over at the expense of 75 local Kiwi suppliers.
School Principals are not happy either, Hora Hora School principal Pat Newman got right to the heart of the matter telling Stuff, “Kids from lower-income families should not have to eat $3 meals, when wealthier families wouldn’t.”
The government keeps saying it wants to improve our education statistics, but when you cut corners on feeding underprivileged students so you can give tax cuts to landlords and Big Tobacco, it’s hard to take you seriously.
I honestly can’t believe I have to type out ‘horse meat scandal’, ‘Big tobacco tax cut’, and ‘cutting funding for feeding school children’ in one piece. It’s incredibly depressing.
Danz
My new book ‘Slices of Heaven: Uniquely Kiwi Comics about Aotearoa’ is available for pre-order now! It’s a print collection of warm and witty comics about the DNA of Aotearoa, celebrating our quirks, institutions, identity, and shared experiences.
