School Dinners - Past, Present and Future

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Baroness Floella Benjamin once said “childhood lasts a lifetime” and our experiences of school dinners can shape how we eat for the rest of our lives. In this edition of The Food Programme Sheila Dillon investigates the importance of those early food memories with the help of Dr Heather Ellis from the School Meals Project. The Project says its aim is to produce the first ever comprehensive history of school meals across the different nations of the United Kingdom The programme makes a trip to the Food Museum in Suffolk to see a landmark exhibition around school food and Sheila pays a visit to a forward-thinking school in West London which bakes its own bread with flour made from the wheat that it grows just outside the school kitchen!

Presented by Sheila Dillon Produced in Bristol for BBC Audio by Robin Markwell

Featuring an archive clip from BBC Breakfast in April 2025 with Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson MP Also a brief extract from the book The Farmer's Wife: My Life In Days by Helen Rebanks

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, Russell Kane here.
0:03.1	I'm back for another season of character assassinating the nice guy
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0:36.2	You're about to listen to another episode of the food program.
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0:49.8	First on BBC Sounds.
0:56.4	It's lunchtime in Suffolk and a special kind of school dinner is being served up to a class of rather unlikely pupils.
1:04.5	Line up over by Dinner Lady Allie and Dinner Lady Becky.
1:07.9	You'll grab a tray.
1:09.0	You'll grab your bowl and your plate and your cutlery and you'll receive your meal.
1:11.6	And I really hope you enjoy your school dinner, thank you very much.
1:14.6	The queuing diners are about to receive a traditional two-course lunch with a heavy side serving of nostalgia.
1:21.6	We've got a lamb hot pot, a vegetarian hot pot and spring greens, all locally sourced with kale from our walled
1:32.0	garden, and we've got chucky chucky pudds with custard. This is in fact, you may have picked
	...

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