Losing It by Ross Gilfillan

Author:Ross Gilfillan [Gilfillan, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-365-6
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2014-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Oliver’s Army

The menu at St Saviour’s school canteen has been changed, yet again. This time last year Monsieur LeClerc’s reign of terror finally came to an end. It had lasted just over eighteen months but it had seemed an awful lot longer. Previously, we’d all had a normal, healthy fear of green vegetables. By the time Monsieur LeClerc had donned his chef’s hat and got cooking, our fear had been ramped up to an acute horror of anything even suggestive of a leaf. There were vegetables on our plates we had never heard of, much less actually seen.

Then there was the meat. Its provenance was never made clear enough for me or for many others. We devised elaborate schemes to avoid actually eating any of those strange, stringy bits of tissue, which we thought were frogs, of course, but could as easily have been calf’s brains, or (a thought which had reduced the pony club girls to tears), horse meat. We didn’t trust Monsieur LeClerc. It wasn’t as if he was a real chef anyway. Monsieur LeClerc had been a supply teacher, until his contract ended, a time which had coincided with TV chef Jamie Oliver’s campaign to Get Kids Eating Stuff They Don’t Like At School Lunch. I may have got the title wrong.

The school governors had seen the way things were going and had taken note of government directives and decided to change the school menu. Out would go the pleasantly palatable diet of before – crinkle-cut oven chips, instant mashed potatoes, carefully processed tinned peas, delicious oven-baked beans in tomato sauce and more body-building protein in the form of giant fish fingers, cryogenically frozen beefburgers and partly pork sausages – and in would come fresh, nutritionally approved and, we were repeatedly assured, wonderfully tasty food.

Jamie Oliver has said that eating habits affect mood, behaviour, health, growth and even our ability to concentrate. And I must say, he was bang on with all of that. Monsieur LeClerc, whom we had grown to know and mistrust as a teacher of French, had barely pulled on his checkered trousers and a new Raymond Blanc accent (Monsieur LeClerc may have a French name, but he grew up in Huddersfield) before our mood began to change. Just as Jamie had said it would. First it was alarm (where the fuck have the Turkey Twiddlers gone?) then it was fright (what is this thing on my plate?) and then complete and utter despondency when we realised that despite the April 1st launch date, it wasn’t an elaborate joke and we’d be getting variations on this awful muck for the foreseeable.

Jamie was right on the other points too. Diet did indeed affect our behaviour, to the extent that two boys were arrested for stealing Ginsters pasties from the local Spar, while any kid foolish enough to openly display a pork pie in the playground risked being savagely mauled. To be honest, I don’t know if the new food affected our growth. There wasn’t time to find out before everything changed again.

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