Before blaming school food, attention should be paid to the eating situation, writes Iltalehti’s Eeva Paljakka.
Ideally, school food is also eaten in peace. Elle Laitila
Gone are the days when cartilage dill meat was eaten at school. During my own schooling in the 1980s and 1990s, dill meat was already quite worthy.
There should be no complaints about school food today. After all, there is no more dill meat there.
But someone in school food rots. It is being eagerly renovated, surrounded by a variety of larger and smaller projects at the municipal and ministry level.
Good.
But there seems to be a trait in the new and great schools that dilutes everything.
This spring, I met six high school students and high school graduates from Lahti during a school food project. The sample is small, of course, but none of them barked at school food.
They study in big high schools with a headline approaching a thousand. Listening to the students, it became clear that everything but the food around the time was wrong.
Food hour is 45 minutes. It’s a little staggered, but not 10 or 15 minutes brings a lot of help. Here are quotes from student stories:
– At worst, it’s only 10 minutes to eat.
– The canteen is a battlefield. If you find a free table, you can sigh with relief.
– I would like to eat at school, but the canteen does not attract anyone. There are long queues and cramped.
– The noise is really loud.
– Food is rotted in the mouth at a rapid rate. I don’t even remember what I ate.
– Sometimes the tables are so dirty that you can’t sit in it.
– The trays were taken from us. The reason was said to be adjusting the water, but every day the plates break when it is awkward to carry.
Of course, not all schools in Finland have the same situation. But the trend is clear: Huge school campuses are being built around the country. That means rush, noise and congestion are not diminishing, at least.
The moment of food seems to be a quick run that needs to get suddenly out of the bottom.
Why in the world be wasting money on improving your food if the dining situation itself is watering down your big plans. Sad.
Even sadder is that no one seems interested. If interested, something would certainly be done about this problem.