Jamie Oliver’s school lunch “revolution” in the UK and the US started out with one basic premise: that school lunches are not healthy. School meals are usually made with processed ingredients and contain more bad stuff than good stuff, and Oliver sought to change all that with meals made with fresh ingredients and sanitary, professional cooking methods. All this, then, helps curb obesity, and enables children to make more healthy choices about what they eat (or what they’re made to eat).
It starts with that premise: schools serve their students a meal. Here, that is not the case. All too often, children at school go hungry for the lack of lunch. Lunches in Philippine public schools are not free, and prohibitively expensive for those children who need the free meal the most.
Don’t get me wrong: I like the idea of encouraging kids to eat healthy and the idea of people eating more indigenous food items, but there’s something amiss – if not remiss – with “Meatless Mondays” applied in Philippine schools, as proposed by Bayan Muna Rep. Teodoro Casiño. It’s not a crappy bill – not at all – if we had a school lunch program set here.