Pulse of the Nation

There was a time when the great battles of the school dinner were about whether you had to eat the skin on the custard. Now the Department for Education has decided the real crisis is deep fat. Not the kitchens that still look like 1987. Not the twelve year old who can smell a Greggs from the ring road. No. The menace is a chip that has met oil.

This is, we are told, the biggest shake-up of school food in England in more than a decade. From September 2027, primary schools will have to serve pulses such as lentils and chickpeas with a main meal at least once a week. Deep fried food is out. Chips may remain, but only if they have been baked, which is the culinary equivalent of being invited to a party and then sat in the hallway. Cake drops to once a week in primary and twice in secondary, and it must arrive with fruit, as if a slice of sponge becomes a vitamin the moment an orange sits next to it.

Breakfast clubs get their first proper rules too. Fried eggs and pastries off the menu. Cereals face a sugar cap, which is government speak for Coco Pops having a quiet word with HR. Schools must publish their menus online. Lucy Powell called the changes once in a generation. That is a lot of weight for a chickpea to carry.

The idea is simple. A third of children leave primary school overweight. Tooth decay is still the main reason five to nine year olds end up in hospital. Fair enough. Nobody is campaigning for more waffles as public policy. But compulsory lentils have the same energy as banning biscuits for adults. It sounds noble. The only guaranteed outcome is a thriving black market in smuggled sausage rolls and a generation who can spot a pulse at twenty paces and walk the other way.

Ministers promise the meals will be exciting. Schools minister Georgia Gould even said lentils are tasty, which is the sort of sentence that should be stress tested on a Year 8 before it leaves the building. If you would like to practise the new national dish at home, Amazon will sell you a kilo of red split lentils.

I do not doubt the fibre figures. I do doubt that a baked chip and a published menu will fix what happens after half three, when the same child meets a corner shop. Still, at least we have a timetable. Primaries first. Secondaries by 2028. Plenty of time for the lentil to become a personality, and for the rest of us to remember that we once survived school dinners that were brown, wet, and somehow still called stew.

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