Nutrition and education

Professional restaurateurs will be invited to create school menus

It seems that, having become completely disillusioned with the qualifications of school cooks, the Russian Ministry of Education and Science is not averse to using the help of restaurant staff. “If we want to solve the problem of feeding children in schools,” Russian Minister of Education and Science Andrei Fursenko said yesterday at a board on preparations for the new school year, “we must make sure that this food is tasty.” According to him, “Russian specialists and restaurateurs” are ready to start improving the menu for schoolchildren now.

Mr. Fursenko believes that prohibitive and coercive measures regarding the food tastes of students will be ineffective and will only lead to the transfer of healthy products and government funds. “If the food in schools is healthy, but absolutely tasteless,” the minister is sure, “then children will one way or another buy lollipops, chips, hamburgers, and what is healthy and good will lie in the trash, regardless of what money will be spent.” Schools in several pilot regions will probably be the first to try the model restaurant cuisine menus. The head of the Ministry of Education and Science recalled that this year a pilot project “to optimize nutrition in schools” will be launched in five or six Russian regions, within the framework of which educational institutions “will have to determine how to make school meals tasty, inexpensive and healthy.”

However, from September 1, all Russian schools will be recommended to refuse to sell a number of so-called buffet products within the walls of educational institutions. “We will not recommend chips, hamburgers, highly carbonated drinks, or natural coffee for sale in school cafeterias,” Russia’s chief sanitary doctor, Gennady Onishchenko, said yesterday. According to him, directors of general education institutions will be asked to be guided when organizing school meals by “two system documents” that will be prepared by the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare (Rospotrebnadzor) by the beginning of the school year. In particular, schools will be recommended a range of food products and an average daily food supply, based on the number of kilocalories children need. According to the calculations of sanitary doctors, the daily energy requirement for children aged 7-11 years is 1000 kilocalories, and for adolescents 11-17 years old - almost 3000 kilocalories. As Rospotrebnadzor press secretary Lyubov Voropaeva told Vremya Novostei, the department annually draws up new standards for student diets. However, as noted in the resolution “On violations of sanitary legislation in educational institutions” posted on the official website of Rospotrebnadzor, “one of the significant shortcomings of catering is the preparation of menus based on the cost of products, and not the physiological needs of children for biologically valuable substances.” This, according to Gennady Onishchenko, is the reason for the “imbalance of the diet in terms of main food ingredients.” The menu of the majority of all 60 thousand surveyed schools in the country does not include meat, fish, dairy products, fruits, milk, or eggs. In Russian educational institutions, according to the conclusion of sanitary doctors, “a carbohydrate nutrition model prevails,” and there is also a “reduction in the volume of servings and a lack of fortification.” And along with the “low professionalism of specialists from school catering enterprises and canteens,” Rospotrebnadzor complains about the insufficient equipment of the catering units of domestic schools with technological and refrigeration equipment. As a result, only 69.3% of the country's students receive hot meals during breaks, while 74.8% of children eat breakfast in school canteens, and only 38.8% of schoolchildren have lunch.

According to sanitary doctors, this is unacceptable in the conditions of “intensification of the educational process”, “increase in the total educational load and decrease in physical activity” that accompanies the implementation of most educational programs today. So, for example, the school day for primary schoolchildren today reaches ten hours, senior schoolchildren 12-15 hours, while, according to sanitary and epidemiological rules, the weekly norm for primary school is 25 hours, and for senior school - a maximum of 36 hours.

Yulia KHOMCHENKO