The Political Quarterly, Vol. 77, No.

3, JulySeptember 2006

School Food and the Public Domain: The Politics of the Public Plate
KEVIN MORGA N
The re-emergence of school food as a political issue in the UK is nothing short of remarkable. Marginalised in Westminster and Whitehall for more than twenty years, the school food issue has suddenly been propelled to the top of the political agenda; so much so that it is becoming a litmus test of the Labour government's avowed commitment to public health, social justice and sustainable development. In the new politics of school food there is, albeit in microcosm, another large issue at stake: the struggle to reinvent the public domain, the sphere of citizenship, equity and service. According to David Marquand, the public domain has its own distinctive culture and rules, and its citizenship rights trump both market power and the bonds of kinship. A fragile construct at the best of times, the public domain has been under siege for the past twenty years, he claims, because successive Conservative and Labour governments have sought to impose marketised norms of behaviour to such an extent that the public domain is now in crisis. For this reason, he argues, it is time `to reinvent the public domain'.1 The fall and rise of the school food issue encapsulates this struggle in an exemplary fashion, even though its central playersschool caterers, dinner ladies and public procurement ocers tend to be invisible gures in the labour movement, especially when compared to miners, steelworkers and other public sector workers. The school meals service may not feature in the iconography of the British trade union movement, but it was just as much aected by deregulation as the coal or steel industries. But the current era of reformthe ecological era signals the most signicant reform of the school meals service since the founding of the welfare state in the 1940s. The main aim of this article is to explore and explain this extraordinary turn of events. To do so the article is structured as follows: . rstly, it examines the three eras of school food reformthe welfare era, the neoliberal era and the emerging ecological era; . secondly, it identies the factors that transformed school food into a political issue; . thirdly, it explores the new ecological era and asks if this signals a renewal of the public domain in any meaningful sense.

The three eras of school food reform The welfare era of collective provision
Given the low political prominence of the school food issue in the 1980s and 1990s one would never know that it was once considered to be one of the foundation stones of the British welfare state. Social policy historians tend to locate the origins of school food policy in the 1880s, when the birth of compulsory education exposed the problem of undernourished children, a problem that rendered them unable to learn eectively. But warfare
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was as important an inuence as welfare when it was discovered that the poor physical condition of recruits during the Boer War impaired the war eort. As a result, a Royal Commission on Physical Deterioration was set up and its report eventually led to the Education (Provision of Meals) Act of 1906, which gave all Local Education Authorities (LEAs) the power to provide meals free for children who needed them and to other children at a charge of no more than the cost of the meal.2 If the origins of the welfare era can be traced back to the 1880s, it was the Education Act of 1944, popularly known as the Butler Act, which really codied the values of the welfare era. Among other things, the 1944 Act laid a duty on all LEAs to provide school meals and milk in primary and secondary schools; it specied that the price of meals could not exceed the cost of the food; and it established that the school lunch had to be suitable as the main meal of the day and meet the nutritional standards that were rst introduced in 1941.3 Signicantly, one of the original intentions of the welfare era was never realised. A parental guide to the 1944 Education Act, published in the same year, outlined a very radical vision by stating `when the School Meals Service is fully developed, school meals will be provided free of charge as part of the educational system'.4 In this crucial respect the welfare era never realised the goal its architects had set themselves. Free school meals for all may have been the biggest casualty of the unrealised welfare era, but it was certainly not the only one. Another was the lack of a national system of nutritional guidelines. In theory a national system had been introduced in 1941, but in practice this was not standardised for the whole country until 1965, prompting one critic to conclude that it was `the policy rather than the implementation which was in place'.5
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Whatever the limitations of the welfare era, the fact that it would appear, in retrospect, as a `golden era' spoke volumes for what followed.

The neoliberal era of choice

Even though the neoliberal era of school food policy was largely driven by a desire to reduce public expenditure, it would be wrong to give the impression that this was the only factor at work. The school meals service had to adjust to the new consumer culture of the 1970s, as a result of which children's tastes were changing, so much so that they were beginning to reject the standardised fare of collective provision, however `nutritious' it was deemed to be. Changing `consumer' behaviour in school canteens was enlisted as evidence to justify a radically dierent school food policy, which was predicated on two of the most resonant values of Conservative ideology, namely less public expenditure and more private choice. The neoliberal era was heralded by, and embodied in, two pieces of legislation, the rst of which was the 1980 Education Act, which transformed the school meals service from a compulsory national, subsidised service for all children, to a discretionary local service. The 1980 Act introduced four fundamental revisions: it removed the obligation on LEAs to provide school lunches, except for children entitled to free school meals; it removed the obligation for meals to be sold at a xed price; it eliminated the requirement for the lunches to meet nutritional standards; and it abolished the entitlement to free school milk.6 The school meals service was identied as one area where substantial savings could be made to public expenditure.7 The second legislative vehicle for the neoliberal era was the 1988 Local Government Act, which introduced compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) into public sector catering. Under the CCT regime local authorities were obliged to subject

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their school meals service to outside competition and, no matter who won the contract, the overall eect was a dramatic reduction in costs. In reality, lower costs carried a cost of their own because CCT triggered a number of profoundly negative changes in the school meals service, notably a lower skilled workforce, a loss of kitchens in schools, and a service ethos deemed to be inimical to healthy eating.8 Of all the changes wrought by CCT, however, the most important was the debasement of the food itself, which has been colourfully described by one leading school cook as `cheap processed muck'.9 Taken together, these twin legislative changes triggered a genuine revolution in the way the school meals service was designed and delivered, especially in secondary schools, where:
Most caterers opted for a cash cafeteria system, resulting in foods being individually priced and the pupils having free choice. Children could spend as much, or as little, as they wanted and there was no method of controlling what pupils ate. The school lunch service was very consumer led and if a food sold well and was protable, it was provided. If it did not sell, or was not protable, it was not provided. Between 1980 and 1998 this strategy led to the current limited range of foods available in most secondary schools.10

The ecological era: sustainable provision and controlled choice

The fact that a radically new school food policy did not appear (in England) until 2005, eight years after New Labour came to power, illustrates the fallacy of thinking that regulatory eras change when governments change. As we will see in the following section, the revolution in British school food policy is generally attributed to Jamie's School Dinners, the celebrity chef 's hugely popular TV series. In actual fact the origins of the policy revolution lie not in a TV studio in London but in an expert panel in Scotland which produced Hungry for Success, a seminal report that called for a radically better school meals service.11 The expert panel made a number of key recommendations, three of which would resonate throughout the UK: . Firstly, it called for a whole school approach to school meals reform, to ensure that the message of the classroom was echoed in the dining room. . Secondly, it called for better quality food to be served in schools, supported by new nutrient-based standards. . Thirdly, it suggested that the school meals service was closer to a health service than a commercial service. The ripple eect of this Scottish social policy innovation stimulated the campaign for school meals policy reform in England and Wales, though these countries did not produce their own equivalent strategies until 2005 and 2006 respectively. Because it appeared so much later, perhaps, the English report went furthest in embracing the ecological approach to school food reform. Far from being purely concerned with the environment, the ecological approach is predicated on one of the core principles of sustainable development thinkingto render visible the costs and connections that have been externalised, and rendered invisible, by
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From today's vantage point, when there is a moral panic about obesity, the neoliberal era of school food policy appears to be a monstrously myopic mistake. In its desire to make short-term public expenditure savings, it actually contributed to the problem of unhealthy eating, a problem which is today costing the public purse many times what was saved by trimming the school meals budget. Before we are tempted to dismiss the neoliberal experiment as a misguided historical curiosity, it is worth reminding ourselves that the values on which it was based namely `cheap food' and `choice'continue to resonate in ocial circles.

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conventional cost-benet analysis, much of which is based on a desiccated metric of prot and loss.12 The English report, Turning the Tables, was the product of a specially convened multifunctional group called the School Meals Review Panel, chaired by Suzi Leather, a well respected food campaigner. Turning the Tables was published in September 2005 and it contained 35 major recommendations as to how and why the government should embark upon a radical reform of the school food system. Echoing many of the recommendations made in Scotland, it signalled an even more holistic approach by including the food procurement process, which it said should be `consistent with sustainable development principles and schools and caterers should look to local farmers and suppliers for their produce where possible'.13 As well as calling for more resources, new skills and higher food standards, the Review Panel also explicitly challenged one of the Prime Minister's most cherished ideological conceptschoice. The Panel strongly endorsed the principle of `choice control' because this, it argued, `has been shown to be eective not only for school lunches, but also in promoting healthier eating from other food outlets within schools'. The government accepted the main thrust of these recommendations on 19 May 2006, when it announced that new food-based standards would come into force in September 2006 to ensure that: . school lunches are free from low quality meat products, zzy drinks, crisps and chocolate or other confectionery; . high quality meat, poultry or oily sh is available on a regular basis; . pupils are served a minimum of two portions of fruit and vegetables with every meal; . deep-fried items are restricted to no more than two portions in a week; . schools and vending providers will
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promote sales of healthy snacks and drinks such as water, milk and fruit juices; . schools will be required to raise the bar even higher when more stringent nutrient-based standardsstipulating essential nutrients, vitamins and mineralsare introduced in primary schools by September 2008 and in secondary schools by September 2009.14 In policy terms, Turning the Tables is arguably the most radical school meals policy statement since the founding of the welfare state, not least because it makes the case for a high quality school food system in terms of health, educational and behavioural benets. These are certainly not the market-based values of the neoliberal era, but are they the values of a resurgent public domain? To answer this question we need to explore the ecological era in more depth by posing the following questions. Why did school meals re-emerge as a political issue? Can the radical designs of the ecological approach be delivered in practice? And, if so, what does this tell us about the status of the public domain?

The re-emergence of school food as a political issue

In the popular mind the re-emergence of school food as a political issue is simply attributed to Jamie Oliver's hugely successful TV series. While the `Jamie Oliver eect' was indeed a powerful factor, perhaps the most important single factor of all, it is probably more accurate to think of it as the `tipping point' for an issue that had been garnering support from many dierent quarters. This is not to belittle the impact of the celebrity chef 's campaign, but rather to set it in a context where we can better understand why it had such resonance. A number of factors played a role in shaping the climate of opinion which enabled the TV series to have the eect it did, the most

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important of which was the escalating `moral panic' about obesity, particularly in children.

choice environment, it was considered essential to change children's eating habits as early as possible.

Childhood obesity
Traditionally conned to health professionals, obesity became a mainstream political issue in the UK in 2004, when the House of Commons Health Committee published a report that opened in apocalyptic terms by saying `With quite astonishing rapidity, an epidemic of obesity has swept over England'.15 It noted that the proportion of the population that is obese had grown by 400 per cent in the last 25 years and it issued a stark warning: if recent trends in childhood obesity continued unchecked, more than 50 per cent of children will be obese by 2020. The advent of obesity in mainstream British politics has generated a heated `blame game', in which each of the main protagonists seeks to divest itself of responsibility by attributing the problem to someone or something else. For example, the food and drink industry attributes obesity to the decline of physical activity and the lack of self-control on the part of consumers, thereby deecting the blame from products that are high in fat, sugar and salt, the sheer ubiquity of which helps fashion our obesogenic environment. In contrast, the Food Commission argues that the obesogenic environment has to be tackled at the highest levels because it is not enough `to focus on the individual, especially the child, and expect them to exercise self-control against a stream of socially endorsed stimuli designed to encourage the consumption of excess food calories'.16 One of the Health Committee's key recommendations inevitably concerned schools, which were urged `to develop school nutrition policies, in conjunction with parents and children, with the particular aim of combating obesity'.17 Although the school was acknowledged to be just one small part of the wider food

The burden of diet-related diseases

Obesity is one of a number of diet-related diseases which have enormous human and nancial costs. The human costs of diet-related diseases can be seen in the mortality and morbidity data, which show marked inequalities between social classes and spatially among the nations and regions of the UK, the worst aected being in the poorer north of the country. The nancial burden of a poor diet is many times greater than the cost of food-borne illness and it is absorbing a growing share of scare NHS resources. As the NHS comes under ever greater pressure there is a growing recognition on the part of government that healthpromoting measures need to be given parity of esteem with illness-treating measures, which is what the health service has been in reality. Healthy eating and built environments that foster rather than frustrate physical activity are primary examples of the kind of healthpromoting measures that will be supported in the future.

Sustainable development
As the threats of climate change loom ever larger over the present, governments are trying to engage with one of the most dicult tasks in politics, namely taking action today to address problems that may (or may not) take their toll tomorrow. The UK's sustainable development strategy aims to make production, consumption, transport and energy more sustainable.18 Food plays an enormously important part in all these activities because it is one of the most globalised sectors in the economy and therefore a major factor in climate change. Some of the most eective NGOs in the UK are based in the food sector, none more so
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than the Soil Association and Sustain, both of which have been very inuential in campaigning for more sustainable food systems, especially in the public sector, which spends more than 2 billion per annum on purchasing food. The UK government aims to become one of the leaders in the EU in the eld of sustainable public procurement, and food was one of the rst sectors to be prioritised for special attention, particularly food in schools and hospitals, where better quality food could benet pupils and patients alike because they were deemed to be vulnerable consumers.

food as part of a whole school approach. Consumer access to healthy eating is also one of the key aims of the Food Standards Agency, which was expressly set up in 2000 to restore public trust in the food chain by being the voice of the consumer in an agri-food system that was hitherto in thrall to producer interests.

The `Feed Me Better' campaign

In their dierent ways the above factors created a climate of opinion which was highly receptive to messages about the quality of children's food, especially if these messages were delivered through the medium of a celebrity TV chef. The rst of a four-part TV series called Jamie's School Dinners was broadcast on 23 February 2005 and, within four weeks, it had captured the public imagination, turning it against the `cheap processed muck' being served up to the nation's schoolchildren. Alongside the TV series the celebrity chef launched the Feed Me Better campaign, which aimed to get 10,000 people to sign a petition for better quality school food. Four days after the nal episode, the Feed Me Better petition had attracted 271,677 signatures and Jamie Oliver delivered it in person to 10 Downing Street, where the Prime Minister promised to take immediate action to improve school food. Within weeks the Education Minister announced plans to review the issue of school food, to put new money into the school meals service and to establish a new School Food Trust to drive the process forward. Health professionals will be forgiven for feeling envious about this chain of events because, having campaigned for this for the best part of twenty years, they had little to show for their eorts. As the Lancet said, `Jamie Oliver has done more for the public health of children than a corduroy army of public health professionals'.

Devolution
Although rarely considered to be a factor, devolution played an important role in the re-emergence of the school food issue because of the Scottish conscious-raising eect. In other words it is doubtful if the awareness of alternatives would have developed as early as it did in the absence of Hungry for Success in Scotland. Despite the stereotypes of Scottish cuisine (which never fail to feature the notorious `fried Mars bar'), Scotland has earned well deserved plaudits for its innovative approach to healthy school food. As we have seen, the Hungry for Success programme greatly impressed the House of Commons Health Committee, so much so that it urged England to emulate parts of it, especially nutrient-based standards.

Food scares and food campaigns

Mainstream political life in Westminster had become much more sensitive to foodrelated issues, not least because of the twin crises of BSE and Foot and Mouth Disease. Furthermore, MPs of all parties expressed support for the Children's Food Bill, presented to Parliament in 2005 by Mary Creagh MP, the aim of which is to protect children from the marketing of unhealthy food and drink products and to promote healthy school
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The scope and limits of the ecological era

The euphoria that greeted the new school food proposals for England could prove to be short lived. School food reform is a process not an event, and therefore the statement from the DfES in May 2006 is nothing more than the beginning of this reform process. Translating the rhetoric into reality is a long term venture that cannot be achieved by administrative at from Whitehall. At least three major conditions need to be met before the grand designs of the ecological era can be delivered in practice in schools throughout the country. First and foremost there is the question of extra resources. Central government has committed 220 million over three years to help fund the transition to a healthier school food service. This is designed to help schools and local authorities to make good the years of underinvestment in food ingredients, kitchens and training provision. Although it will certainly help to get the reform process under way, it is highly doubtful if this level of investment will be sucient to put it on a sustainable footing. Local authorities may be unable to make up the shortfall either because they lack the resources or, where schools have opted out of LEA control, because they have no direct responsibility. Whatever the case, campaigners will no doubt point out that the sums needed to sustain the ecological era of school food are minuscule in the context of a public procurement system where multibillion pound cost overruns are routinely tolerated in military projects. Secondly, new skill sets will be needed to implement the reforms. School caterers and dinner ladies will need to be radically retrained to equip themselves with healthy cooking skills. Parents will need to be involved so that they support the school meals service during its transition to a health and well-being service, otherwise they may withdraw their children, a

move that could threaten the economic foundations of the school catering service. Teachers, too, have to be mobilised because the ecological era is predicated on the whole-school approach, where the message of healthy eating permeates the canteen, the vending machine and the classroom. Finally, farmers and producers will need to acquire new skills to enable them to supply local schools with fresh, locally produced food. From farm to fork, then, new skills will have to be developed throughout the food chain. Thirdly, greater social participation will be required if the reform is to be successfully sustained. While the welfare and neoliberal eras designed their policies for children, the ecological era will have to design and deliver its policies with children and their parents. A more deliberative and democratic system of governance will enable children to become active agents in their own transformation rather than the passive objects they have been in the past. Children and their parents need to be more actively engaged in discussing the transition to healthy eating because, according to the Local Authorities Caterers' Association, the number of school meals fell by 10 per cent in the year following the Jamie Oliver TV series, equivalent to some 71 million meals. Healthy eating should be understood as a socially negotiated process rather than a technically conceived event because children's tastes cannot be transformed overnight. If nance, skills and governance are the chief concerns, they are not the only ones. The Health Education Trust, for example, lamented the fact that the government refused to increase the eligibility for free school meals, a major worry for health campaigners because higher school food prices could further reduce the take-up rate of the midday meal, still the only hot meal of the day for many children. If takeup rates fail to improve in the near future the next wave of reform could be in the direction of `free school meals for all', a
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policy that is now being championed by the Scottish Socialist Party and one that is already being implemented in primary schools in Hull, where take-up rates seem to have signicantly improved. Another concern worth mentioning because it gets so little political attention is the slow death of the lunch-hour. More and more schools are trying to condense lunch into as little as thirty minutes, rendering it impossible for children to learn to enjoy their food in a pleasant eating environment. Unless more time is found for the school lunch period it may be dicult if not impossible to deliver the new school food standards. However, if these problems can be resolved the ecological era of school food reform can legitimately claim to be the most signicant since the founding of the British welfare state. Since it radically eschews the consumerist values of the neoliberal era, which extolled choice and prot as ends in themselves in school canteens, the ecological era signals the resurgence of the values of the public domain. The values that inform the new school food reform are public health and social justice, the intrinsically signicant values of the public domain rather than the instrumental values of the market domain. If the school meals service is taken to be a microcosm of the public domain, it suggests that the neoliberal kulturkampf of the 1980s and 1990s has been checkedin part because the burgeoning costs associated with obesity and other diet-related diseases were deemed to be unsustainable in human and nancial terms. The most important ideological mantras of the junk food industry revolve around two propositions: rstly, that there is no such thing as bad foods, only bad diets, and, secondly, that food choice is a private not a public matter. Each of these mantras has been severely compromised by the new era of school food reform. In the rst case, as we have seen, certain foods have been banned
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from the school environment because they are considered to be inappropriate, which is tantamount to saying that they are `bad' foods. In the second case, the escalating public cost of diet-related diseases has undermined the notion that the food choice environment is a wholly private matter. To keep the state at bay the junk food industry likes to invoke the spectre of the `nanny state' to give the impression that any action to regulate food choice amounts to an illegitimate invasion of the private realm. However, the deployment of the `nanny state' manifestly failed to stop the reform of school food for one very special reasonthe consumers in question were children, and a benign `nanny' was perceived to be no bad thing. Although the school food issue assumes a special character, given the involvement of children, it is part and parcel of a wider debate about the division of labour between the state and the individual in the design and delivery of public services. Across a wide range of public servicesespecially health, pensions, welfare, crime and climate change for examplethere is a growing realisation that `governments can't do it alone'.19 The public domain, it is said, cannot be reinvented without `halting and then undoing the neoliberal revolution'.20 Yet this is precisely what the ecological era of school food reform seeks to achieve and, if it can resolve the barriers identied above, it can rightly claim to be a microcosm of a reinvented public domain. Although we cannot generalise too much from the school food issue, given the special status of the consumers involved, it suggests that the public domain in Britain is not preordained to atrophy and decline. It also suggests that the values of the public domainparticularly the intrinsically signicant values of equity, health and servicecontinue to resonate in and beyond the school food sector.

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Notes
1 D. Marquand, Decline of the Public: The Hollowing Out of Citizenship, Polity, 2004, p. 5. 2 S. Passmore and G. Harris, `Education, health and school meals: a review of policy changes in England and Wales over the last century', Nutrition Bulletin, vol. 29, 2004, pp. 2217. 3 I. Sharp, Nutritional Guidelines for School Meals, Caroline Walker Trust, London, 1992. 4 U. Gustafsson, `School meals policy: the problem with governing children', Social Policy & Administration, vol. 36, no. 6, 2002, pp. 68597. 5 Gustafsson, `School meals policy'. 6 Passmore and Harris, `Education, health and school meals'. 7 Sharp, Nutritional Guidelines for School Meals. 8 Scottish Executive, Hungry for Success: A Whole School Approach to School Meals in Scotland, Edinburgh, 2002. 9 J. Orrey, The Dinner Lady, Transworld Publishers, London, 2003. 10 Passmore and Harris, `Education, health and school meals'. 11 Scottish Executive, Hungry for Success. 12 K. Morgan, School Meals and Sustainable Food Chains: The Role of Creative Public Procurement, The Caroline Walker Lecture 2004, Royal Society, London, 2004. 13 School Meals Review Panel, Turning the Tables: Transforming School Food, London, 2005. 14 Department for Education and Skills, Setting the Standard for School Food, Press Notice, 19 May 2006. 15 House of Commons, Obesity, Third Report of the Health Committee, HC 23-1, The Stationery Oce, 2004, p. 7. 16 House of Commons, Obesity, p. 52. 17 Ibid., p. 59. 18 Sustainable Consumption Roundtable, I Will If You Will: Towards Sustainable Consumption, National Consumer Council / Sustainable Development Commission, London, 2006. 19 Cabinet Oce, Personal Responsibility and Changing Behaviour: The State of Knowledge and Its Implications for Public Policy, Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, 2004. 20 Marquand, Decline of the Public.

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