Poor-quality school lunches: schools face major challenges in running their own kitchens
Text / Upstream and Downstream reporters Kuo Hsiu-chen, Lin Hui-chen
The white rice additive incident highlights the transportation and food safety risks that simply cannot be avoided when nutritious school lunches are outsourced, but does setting up one's own kitchen really mean everything is smooth sailing? Many frontline staff do not think so. Beyond the issues of funding and space, in fact, once a kitchen is set up, the challenges are only just beginning.
Parent: The scale of the kitchen cannot expand without limit
Sun Wen-chang began paying attention to children's nutritious lunches 8 years ago. He once served on a school nutritious lunch committee, personally supervised the kitchen, and when visiting other schools, he often heard students complain that the meals were already cold by the time they reached the table.
"What difference is there between an oversized central kitchen and an outside group-meal caterer?" he said. The key to the problem is not the kitchen, but the scale of meal provision.
To ensure the meals are fresh, based on his experience supervising kitchens, each meal is best cooked after 9 o'clock, and the corresponding meal volume is about 1500 people. If a school has only 500 people, it can join with 2 or 3 schools to set up a kitchen together. If it already has many students itself, it can set one up independently, but this needs to be adapted to local conditions, because each school's distance and environment differ, and the same standard cannot be applied.
He stressed that he is not trying to attack central kitchens, but hopes that newly established kitchens can pay attention to the issue of meal volume, and that existing large kitchens can be reduced and controlled to a certain meal volume.
Dietitian: Schools with their own kitchens must be willing to invest in labor and ingredients
