Montville School

The Sacred Chef spent an enjoyable few months catering for the kids at Montville Primary School recently. It is  a lovely little school painted in primary colours and it starts each day with rock n roll music cheerfully blaring out over the PA system, courtesy of the school janitor’s taste in music. As I would arrive in the morning, with my boxes of food prepared earlier that morning, it struck me as wonderfully different to what my primary school had been like. Then even the idea of having rock music as part of the singing classes, which I remember were broadcast over the radio sitting high on the wall above the teacher into the classroom once  a week, would have been cause for somebodies dismissal I am sure. At Montville School I felt a lovely relaxed camaraderie between parents arriving with children and the teachers and staff I met. Within this comforting hustle and bustle of students, making their way to classes to the strident beat of ACDC on a Highway to Hell, I would begin setting up the tuck shop kitchen.

Several of the mums on the P & C committee had worked hard to get me this gig, against some entrenched resistance to the idea of having a paid chef involved in the school canteen, and it had taken nearly six months of meetings.  I met a really friendly and enthusiastic bunch of volunteer mums and the occasional dad too, who all made me feel very welcome. Of course there were a few administrative hoops to get through, like getting a Blue card, which is a QLD Government permit to work in schools around children, meaning that they check me out to see that I am not a paedophile or other unsuitable character. This arrived the week after I had finished term 4 at the school and took in excess of four months to be processed at the cost of some $70 or $80 dollars I think. Next up was Insurance, although nobody was very sure what I was being insured for or against, this was closer to $600 or $700 for a year. I did ask if the volunteer mums were insured and they were not but despite the fact that I was doing exactly the same thing as they were, making food in my kitchen and bringing it to school to be sold, I had to have insurance – so I got that too.  There is an air of fear hanging over the administration of institutions like schools and I can understand it, but it also disempowers those involved in the process and removes individual humaneness. Interestingly with the Blue card there is a whole extra section to fill out if you are a member of a religious order – I suppose they have learnt to target the areas where the most likely offenders are coming from.

The school had a permaculture garden, which had been established by one of the mums and involved the kids in all the aspects of growing herbs and vegetables in a harmonious way with nature. This was to be a source of some of the produce to be used in the school lunches. It was things like this that really excited me about being involved in something like this and I had been inspired by Jamie Oliver’s TV series about transforming canteens in the British school system. I had also learnt about Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden program, which was now running in around a hundred schools in Australia. You see school canteens, like much of the rest of the economy and the fast food industry, had been taken over by free market inspired methodologies and their exponents. It was all about money – not just about costing too much but indeed they were using it to actually raise money by selling frozen crumbed everything with chips. You also had companies like Cadbury’s and Krispy Kreme doughnuts supplying their products at wholesale prices for schools to use in their fund raising activities. The companies get the kudos of being involved in ‘good deeds’ and at the same time are spreading the taste of their sugary products to the next generation. These economic first attitudes to how school canteens are being run are firmly entrenched in the P & C’s mind sets and are only just beginning to change. Montville Primary School is at the cutting edge of nutritional awareness in Australian schools and has a great bunch of parents involved in their P & C group.

Making food for kids, as I am sure many parents are aware, involves a balance between creating something that is familiar enough to their tastes for them to want to eat it and also can stretch their culinary experience  a little in the right direction. Here is  a word for you Neophobia – fear of the new – and in studies 77% of kids between the ages of 2 to 10 years regularly exhibit this behaviour in relation to unfamiliar foods. So now we can yell at our uncooperative kids at mealtimes, you “Neophobe!” So at the school, I was treading a fine line between, what the kids knew of as desirable fare and what I as a chef considered Tres Bien. There has also been a lot of talk about children not having physiologically developed taste buds like that of an adult, but after doing quite a bit of research I have found this not to be conclusively true. In fact there is a lack of scientific knowledge about taste buds and their receptors in our brains, indeed nutritional science is an under explored realm of science. Studies indicate that children need to be exposed to new foods and a wide variety of vegetables when they are very young, 2-10 years, for them to build up an appreciation of these flavours – we are establishing neural pathways at this time. Research has shown that genetically, if the children come from parents who are meat eaters, they will favour meat in their appreciation of flavours at early ages. Children have difficulty in answering graded questions in regard to their food and taste preferences at ages 2-10 years, and as we all know the visual appearance of food rates far more highly at these ages than as adults. So when I put too much garlic in the yoghurt dressing for the organic chicken burger, I received a bit of  a back lash from my young culinary punters, of course to my taste it was fairly bland. Making food on mass, for delicate pallets such as these, can leave one with a sneaking feeling of dissatisfaction as  a chef, but  I was always impressed by the enthusiasm and general verve of my clientèle.

Often I would need to begin at 5am to have the necessary number of serves ready, by the early lunchtime required, and this is always going to be true of fresh food. To prepare food, which is not from a frozen source, but created fresh for consumption, it needs to be cooked and assembled at the last possible moment to carry that aliveness into the mouths and digestive systems of the recipients. Real flavour and nutrition comes from this awareness and some hard work too. The mums and dads were also working hard as volunteers and contributing their love to the health and wellbeing of  all the children. In my 30 years experience in cooking I have found that there are no short cuts with good food.

In the end the forces of economics got me, as a local restaurant owner and parent came on board and said he would do it for nothing, and the P & C bowed to a better deal. I did however enjoy my time at the Montville Primary School tuck shop and applaud the parents involved for their commitment to good healthy food for their kids.

April 18, 2011 | Categories: Kids, Latest Blog, nutrition, Reviews, Uncategorized | Tags: Blue card, canteens, childhood development, children, cooking, dads, eating, herbs, Jamie Oliver, kids, kitchen garden, menus, Montville, mums, neophobia, nutrition, P & C, permaculture, research, sacred chef catering, schools, Stephanie Alexander, studies, sudha hamilton, taste buds, tuck shop, vegetables, veggies, volunteers | Leave A Comment »