Pollensa parents question quality of school dinners

Joan Collins
LOCAL schools, it seems, are badly in need of a Jamie Oliver to sort out their food problems. Hot on the heels of the claim, reported in the Bulletin yesterday, that Spanish school dinners are unhealthy, parents in Pollensa are up in arms about their children being served frozen food. Parents of the children who attend the Costa i Llobera school in Pollensa have questioned the quality of the food served for school lunch each day.
They say that the school “has changed the company which supplies the food for school dinners. Now the catering company transports the food for the entire week from Barcelona, where it is packeted and frozen”. The parents question if the children are eating an adequate diet, and think that the food the school is feeding to their children “is junk”. “We think that it must have a lot of preservatives in it to make it last that long”, they said. “Last year”, say the parents, “the centre recommended to us parents that children should take their packed lunches in a lunchbox instead of wrapped in paper to avoid too much rubbish yet now, with this system of packeting the school lunches there must be two bags of rubbish per day. We think that this is very ironic”. The headmistress of the school, Joana Vicens, explained that the school had not chosen the catering company, but “the company tendered for the job and was awarded the contract by the Balearic Ministry of Education. The school does not have the power to choose the catering company”. The headmistress, who has not received any direct complaints from the parents, explained that “we use a system of frozen food. The company in Barcelona vacuum packs the food at four degrees and sends us enough food for the week. Here we defrost it and serve it to the children”. She added that “I have myself tried the food and it is good, and the dining room monitors agree”. The headmistress of the school thinks that the main problem the parents have is that they “cannot always reserve a place for their child in the dining room as we have a set number of meals”. The catering company has said it will send five more menus per day in order to cater for the children who only stay to school dinner from time to time.
In addition to this the company has also promised to send extra dishes so that the parents can try the food and see for themselves that it is good. They are confident that the parents will confirm this once they have tried it for themselves.