East Ayrshire Council's efforts to source local food for its school meals has won plaudits from the Soil Association Scotland, says FIONA MacLEOD
SCHOOLS have always been viewed as safe havens for our children, as places where they can learn and grow up healthily. But recent revelations have shown otherwise, with youngsters being fed school lunches containing reconstituted meat products loaded
with fat and salt, which damage not just health but their ability to learn.
Studies have shown pupils who have access to sugary or fatty foods and drinks at lunchtime often return to the classroom hyperactive and take time to settle back into lessons – wasting valuable learning time.
And a recent international report indicated Scots are the second most obese nation in the world behind Americans.
With growing concern about the environmental impact of global warming, questions are also being raised about why we add to carbon emissions by flying food from the other side of the world simply because it is cheaper.
Robin Gourlay, the head of catering at East Ayrshire Council, doesn't believe the health of our children is worth risking to save money.
Three and a half years ago, before Jamie Oliver had been publicly horror-struck by his first Turkey Twizzler, Gourlay was already setting in motion his plan to rectify the situation.
Since he began creating innovative menus with locally-sourced organic food for primary children, Gourlay has seen his project win awards and become an international ambassador for the scheme.
He says: "In the months before August 2004, we tried to set up what we called a sustainable school meals service – one where all the food was ethically sourced, and as far as possible locally sourced, and using a proportion of organic food. We were first in the UK and maybe one of the first in Europe."
Initially Gourlay's focus was on introducing organic meals because of the potential health and environmental issues, but he also wanted to challenge the notion that school food equals cheap food.
He says: "I wanted to introduce a demonstrably high-quality school meals service that would be above reproach and give parents confidence that this was a good service that the children could benefit from."
Since then he has seen the pilot school for his project – Hurlford Primary in Kilmarnock – win an award from the Soil Association and inspired other schools to follow suit.
Gourlay says: "We set up a very robust financial monitoring system at the outset because I knew if it was successful other people would look at it, and we'd need to have that robust financial and qualitative information. It has shown this is possible and viable and it is attracting interest throughout Scotland."
In November, Gourlay was asked to speak about the project at an international conference in Seville on the use of the public sector's buying power to change markets.
And in 2006 he was asked to speak at a slow-food conference in Italy called Terra Madre, attended by nearly 9,000 people from around the world.
He says: "Rather than buying from huge multinational suppliers, which more or less dictate what we're going to eat and what's available, it is about using the buying power of the public sector to influence or change what's actually produced.
"Everything we buy within East Ayrshire is from within 30 or 40 miles of Kilmarnock so I know exactly which farm I'm buying lamb and pork from, and I buy cheese from an artisan cheese maker in Dunlop. She has her own goats and dairy herd, harvests all her own milk, and she turns it into cheese so I know exactly where it is coming from.
"Everything that I buy, other than some dry goods and things like bananas, I know exactly where it comes from, how it's been farmed or reared and looked after and it's delivered straight to the schools."
Gourlay believes the potential benefits on both the local economy and the environment, and on the health of the children, is worth the slight extra cost of food.
He says: "We are investing in the local community, and by reducing food miles and so on we are benefiting the environment, and the cost is not that much more.
"It costs about 15 pence per two-course meal for me to source locally compared to buying from national contracts, where they don't source locally, so that 15 pence is well spent as far as I'm concerned."
At the moment the scheme has been adopted in 26 of the area's 44 primary schools and it will be expanded to all of them in phases.
The scheme has also won an award for public service from a national newspaper. But Gourlay says the heart of the project was to widen children's experience of healthy food.
He explains: "We introduced quite radical menus which are quite challenging for some children. My idea was to introduce them to a wider range of food and try and make that normal and acceptable through repetition. There's a lot of stuff the children wouldn't necessarily find at home but what I did was produce the menus and then we tried to source locally.
"I didn't find out what was best and most affordable locally and then build into the menus, because I wanted to increase children's vocabulary of food."
Food for Life, the Soil Association Scotland's healthy local food project, aims for 75 per cent of school cooked meals to be unprocessed, 50 per cent of ingredients to be sourced locally and 50 per cent to be organic as well as to educate children on where their food comes from.
Pam Rodway, the Food for Life manager, is full of praise for Gourlay.
She says: "He has been able to be an ambassador and he has spoken on an international basis on this. They embraced the targets very wholeheartedly, they involved the whole school, and the atmosphere in the dining room when children are receiving and eating food is very impressive."
