Is the school nutritious lunch toxic? New News collaborative special report (2)
Editor's note: Out of concern for the school lunch issue, the special report "School Nutrition Lunch Is So Toxic?!" is jointly published by The Journalist magazine and Newsmarket, with both parties collaborating. This series contains three reports in total, and this article is the second in the series.
Introduction: Following "The Journalist" School Nutrition Lunch Is So Toxic?! (1), this article examines the problems school lunches face under the current procurement law's bidding system. But beyond merely guarding against abuses, how the competent authorities should implement professional nutrition education and actively promote food education still awaits public attention and oversight.
The Bidding System: How Can the Negative Effects of Low-Price Bidding Be Eliminated?
If the "most advantageous bid" were adopted instead, meaning that victory does not depend on the lowest price but rather on vendors submitting their service content and items for a procurement committee convened by the principal to evaluate, could the negative effects of low-price bidding be solved? The answer is probably not necessarily. Because the evaluation committee consists of only five to seven members, and the committee members are also administrative staff and teacher representatives appointed by the principal, it is easy for interested group-meal caterers or principals to manipulate the evaluation results. If vendors also face demands from school administrative staff for various kinds of "kickbacks" under all sorts of pretexts, then since wool comes from the sheep's back, the quality of the lunches will naturally be sacrificed in return.
Zhong Kunzhi, a parent of a child at a public elementary school in Xinyi District, Taipei City, who has some understanding of food service management, cited his own experience as a lunch committee member of the parents' association, and found that school lunches provided in the form of boxed meals or bulk tub meals have a great many problems. He recalled one occasion when a vendor's lunch delivery was being inspected and accepted, and he found that the so-called shrimp scrambled eggs on the menu contained only a few shrimp, the pickled melon seed meat had only a little minced meat, and the ten-grain rice was merely white rice with a few grains of brown rice added.
He then went to the vendor's factory to inspect it, and saw that the hot and sour soup or corn chowder on the menu was made by the vendor pouring packet after packet of powder into hot water and stirring. These powder packets bore no food ingredient labeling at all, and when a large ladle was used to stir the soup tub, almost no fresh ingredients could be seen. At this point Zhong Kunzhi finally understood why his child kept complaining that school lunch did not taste good, and by three or four in the afternoon would clamor about being hungry and want to buy snacks to stave off hunger.
School Lunches: Are the Oversight and Gatekeeping Mechanisms Failing?
Observing how school lunches operate, Zhong Kunzhi found that when group-meal caterers bid, they say one thing but actually do another. The teachers or parents responsible for acceptance inspections have received no basic food safety training whatsoever, and during acceptance inspections there is no manual or written material to refer to, so they are easily brushed off by vendors and have no ability to oversee at all.
"This kind of school lunch acceptance inspection is purely a formality. How can we safeguard our children?" Zhong Kunzhi also recalled that when carrying out the acceptance inspection, the school's lunch officer originally wanted him to just look at the faculty and staff meal tubs, but he insisted on also inspecting the meal tubs for the students in the classrooms. Comparing the two, he unexpectedly found that the faculty and staff lunches had richer dishes. This was unacceptable to him: for the same NT$50 per meal, why were the school lunch dishes inferior to the NT$50 boxed lunches found everywhere off campus? Where exactly were the lunch funds that parents paid for their children going?
↑ For the same money spent, Zhong Kunzhi bluntly criticized that school lunch dishes were inferior to the NT$50 boxed lunches outside.
Zhong Kunzhi's doubts are also the heartfelt sentiment of many parents. Xie Guoqing, chairman of the National Alliance of Parents' Associations, pointed out that for a long time schools have never disclosed where lunch funds go, and when schools select vendors, parents cannot participate in the operation of the school lunch committee. He repeatedly petitioned the Ministry of Education, hoping to let parent representatives participate in the selection of lunch vendors, but the reply he received was that the competent authority for the Government Procurement Act is the Public Construction Commission, and the commission, on the grounds that parents lack expertise in nutrition lunches, would not allow them to participate in the selection.
"It turns out that when the prosecutors and investigators handled the nutrition lunch corruption case this time, they found that the so-called 'experts' of the Public Construction Commission were also suspected of taking bribes," Xie Guoqing said indignantly.
Wu Zhongtai, secretary-general of the National Federation of Teachers' Unions, analyzed that the lunch fees of elementary and secondary schools nationwide add up to NT$14 billion to NT$15 billion a year, and if social donations and government subsidies are added, it reaches as high as NT$17 billion to NT$18 billion. Because the interests are enormous, problems of low-price bidding and vendor recruitment specifications easily arise.
Wu Zhongtai said that the number of participants in the school lunch evaluation committee and the way they are selected both affect the evaluation results. The corruption that erupted in New Taipei City this time was precisely because the operation of the evaluation committee was not transparent and the number of committee members was small, making it easy for the principal to manipulate things under the table. In addition, elected representatives are also a source of pressure, because principals, in order to secure subsidy funds or to avoid being taken to task in the council, will yield to a minority of self-serving elected representatives and let a specific group-meal company win the bid.
Nutrition Education Expertise Is Not Valued
Besides food ingredient acceptance inspections being reduced to a formality, campus dietitians, who possess the most food and nutrition-related professional knowledge, not only have their expertise undervalued in the education system, but the number of campus dietitians in Taiwan also appears woefully inadequate compared with neighboring Japan.
Jin Huimin, chairman of the National Federation of Dietitians' Associations, said that the job duties of a professional campus dietitian should encompass "meal nutrition planning and promotion," "supervision of meal preparation and supply," "nutrition education," and necessary administrative affairs. That is to say, from food ingredient selection, cooking, heat preservation, and transportation to eating habits at the table, dietitians must control the entire process.
But the reality is that if dietitians strictly control food ingredients or meal quality, they may face interference from the principal, and in worse cases even receive threatening phone calls from vendors. In addition, the School Health Act stipulates that schools below the senior high school level with their own kitchens and with 40 or more classes being served meals should set up at least one dietitian. Such a staffing ratio also leaves campus dietitians run ragged.
Jin Huimin said that campus dietitians must shoulder supervision of kitchen hygiene and safety, kitchen staff management, menu design and nutrition analysis, food ingredient purchasing and acceptance inspection cost control, budget revenue and expenditure accounting work, equipment planning and maintenance, administrative work, and cross-school regional services, let alone finding time for nutrition education. What is more, many counties and cities have insufficient campus dietitian staffing, so that nutrition education in most schools is handled concurrently by nurses, physical education teachers, or health section chiefs who lack professional nutrition capabilities, or is entirely carried out by dietitians hired by outsourced lunch vendors.
Although the Ministry of Education planned in the 100th year of the Republic of China (2011) to assist county and city governments in hiring 443 dietitians, a Control Yuan investigation found that by the 99th year (2010) only 344 had been hired, a completion rate of only 70 percent. Among the counties and cities, only Taipei City, New Taipei City, Kaohsiung City, and Yunlin County had full staffing; most counties and cities either had not hired campus dietitians or had insufficient staffing.
From the current state of campus dietitian staffing, the disregard for food and nutrition education from the central Ministry of Education down to local county and city governments is highlighted. Jin Huimin pointed out that neighboring Japan, after implementing the "Basic Act on Shokuiku (Food Education)" in July 2005, stipulated that schools at all levels must add a position of "nutrition teacher," and within just three years, the number of nutrition teachers in Japan had already approached two thousand.
↑ Good nutrition education can cultivate correct eating habits and environmental awareness in children from an early age. Heping Elementary School in Hukou Township, Hsinchu County, conducted a food education course that was affirmed by Mrs. Elizabeth Henderson, a pioneer of the community-supported agriculture movement in the United States.
Nutrition teachers are different from campus dietitians. Jin Huimin explained that nutrition teachers possess both dietitian and teacher qualifications. In addition to the original work of campus dietitians, because they hold teaching qualifications, they can offer nutrition classes to students. This system allows nutrition teachers to tailor various food education-related courses according to the different needs of each school, so that good eating habits and concepts can take root from an early age.
Taiwan's Food Education: All Talk and No Action!
In contrast, Taiwan's food education still remains at the level of discussing whether school lunch dishes taste good or are safe. Jin Huimin examined outsourced boxed meals (or bulk tub meals) for nutrition lunch in Taipei City and found that the dishes used too many processed products, and most were cooked by deep-frying, heavy oil, or heavy salt methods. In particular, vendors finished cooking the food ingredients at around nine in the morning, and by the time the children ate it, three hours had passed in between. She said that even if no poisoning occurred, the food was not fresh and the taste was very poor.
Giving children correct dietary concepts is closely related to their future development. The famous British chef Jamie Oliver, who recently exposed that the American fast-food chains McDonald's and Burger King used beef scraps disinfected with ammonia as hamburger meat, once said: "This may be the first time in history that children will die earlier than their parents' generation." Because modern children's eating habits are poor, this is true not only in the UK; applied to Taiwan, a similar situation has also appeared.
According to a nationwide health survey of elementary and secondary school students conducted by the Ministry of Education, most children eat out for both breakfast and dinner, half the children have abnormal body composition, about 15 percent of children are overweight, 24 percent of girls and 19.2 percent of boys have high cholesterol, and 37 percent of girls and 25.2 percent of boys have abnormal uric acid. These are all caused by poor eating habits and in turn affect students' performance at school. This all highlights the importance and urgency of adding food education alongside moral, intellectual, physical, social, and aesthetic education.
Reforming nutrition lunches is absolutely not just about catching a few bribe-taking principals or revising the bidding method and taking passive measures to prevent abuses; it requires education authorities to start from dietary education and take more macro-level and more active measures. After all, the nation's long-term competitiveness depends on the health of these future masters. (To be continued)
"The Journalist" School Nutrition Lunch Is So Toxic?! (1)
For the full series of reports, please see the issue published on February 2, 2012, of"The Journalist" Issue No. 1300
Recommended Reading
Child, is your lunch nutritious? The Future in the Bowl: Special Report Guide
Analysis of Food Poisoning Cases in Taiwan in the 99th Year of the Republic of China (2010)