See if you can read Alexander Chancellor's recent article in the Guardian without wishing you'd gone to school in Italy. He writes:
Posted on May 9, 2005 01:08 PM. Filed under: food.While in Rome to witness the election of Pope Benedict XVI, I saw a bit of my niece Amelia, who lives there with her Italian husband and two children. The eldest of these children, Alice, is four and attends a municipal infants' school.
Alice's education is free, but her school lunches cost €2 (about £1.35) each, which is the same amount charged by schools, for example, in Portsmouth, Luton and Wolverhampton. But Alice's school meals are of an integrity that even Jamie Oliver doesn't contemplate, let alone the council of any English town. All fruit, vegetables, rice, pasta and bread fed to Roman schoolchildren have to be organic, and no genetically modified food is allowed. Even the chocolate puddings are made from organic chocolate. School meals have to be cooked on the premises on the day that they are eaten, with recipes written by municipal dieticians aiming to make them as nutritious and tasty as possible. (...)
Alice loves her school meals, for which there are 25 summer menus and 25 winter menus, all of them different. Each comprises at least three courses, including lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as fish or meat. Typical summer menus at Alice's school include the following: pasta with zucchini, tuna in extra-virgin olive oil, potato and tomato salad, bread, fruit; vegetable purée with pasta, chicken breasts with olives, roast potatoes, bread, ice cream; saffron risotto, halibut rissoles, mashed carrot, bread, fruit. And so on. [continue]