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Linklater's Scotland: Cooking school meals
Magnus Linklater
Columnist, Scotland on Sunday
Filed 20 June 06
©Magnus Linklater
This
article, which was originally published in the Spectrum section
of
Scotland on Sunday on 18th June 2006, is reproduced on Land-Care
with the kind permission of the author and the newspaper
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/spectrum.cfm?id=882072006
JEAN is a cook in a rural school. The geographical
vagueness is deliberate - because, although Jean is a wonderful
cook, her home-made soups, cakes and puddings a local legend, her
kitchen a magnet for the pupils, and her insistence on fresh food
wholly admirable, she is being watched.
The food police are on to her. They have a record of everything
from the state of her fridge to the scrubbed surface of her chopping-board.
They have intimate details of her recipes, and the exact positioning
of her kitchen furniture. They know how much Mr Muscle she uses,
and whether she has switched from making her own gravy to relying
on Knorr stock cubes. They have monthly temperature figures for
the stove area, and they know where and when she leaves her cakes
to cool overnight. No wonder she is nervous.
This is not some sub-Orwellian caricature, it's the daily reality
for every cook in every school in the country - and this is not
the half of it. In the top drawer of her filing cabinet, Jean has
a thick folder of documents that tell her how to run her kitchen.
She has 12 sheets of instructions, with boxes that have to be ticked
and spaces to be filled out and double-checked every day, week and
month of the school term. The detail is mind-boggling.
What this means is that if Jean decides to make
her own gravy one day using a Delia Smith recipe instead of her
own, she has to note it down. If she moves the fridge into another
corner of the kitchen, a box must be ticked. Meat delivered from
the butcher: time, date, details. For every purchase Jean makes,
she has to check the sell-by date and note it in her book. Then,
at the end of every day, she must "visually check" whether
any food has exceeded its date. All this has to be noted and passed
by the management.
For a large, well-staffed school with office back-up,
all this can presumably be absorbed as part and parcel of modern
procedure. But for a small school, like Jean's, it is an almost
intolerable burden, and it drives her to distraction. "I hardly
have time to cook these days," she says. "It's not just
the paperwork itself, it's the way we have to report back the whole
time instead of just getting on with the job."
She has even had to banish the pupils, who once
loved to come in to watch her work or join in the cooking, because
of health and safety hazards. The kitchen, once the warmest and
most welcoming place in the school, has had to be turned into an
antiseptic no-go area. But to what end?
To protect against infection, says the health
and safety lobby. There are more cases of E.coli poisoning in Scotland
than anywhere else in Britain - ergo we have to tighten the rules,
enforce regulations and ensure that guidelines are adhered to. If
this makes them rigid and intrusive, so be it. It is a price worth
paying for the sake of the nation's health. By recording and monitoring
the way food safety is delivered, we ensure not only that standards
are maintained, but that they are seen to be maintained. A box ticked
is a step towards ensuring public confidence. But is it?
Far from improving food safety, the figures seem
to be getting worse. Instead of the public being reassured, confidence
is declining. This year alone there have been serious outbreaks
of E.coli in Aberdeenshire, Lanarkshire and Fife. There are around
200 cases a year in Scotland - not a huge number, but still double
the figure for the rest of the UK. And no one really knows why.
Professor Hugh Pennington, who advises the government
on bacterial infections, admits that we still know remarkably little
about E.coli, how it is picked up and passed on. The suggestion
that Scotland suffers more because of its higher proportion of farmland
seems to fall down when statistics for rural areas such as Devon
and Cornwall are examined - theirs are about the same as Glasgow's,
so it seems that this is a much an urban problem as a rural one.
Most previous infections have been traced not
to kitchens or school premises, but to food processors, butchers
or abattoirs. The irony of Jean's situation is that all these regulations
now encourage her to buy in processed food rather than relying on
her own cooking. It is far easier to tick a reassuring box when
you have bought a pack of frozen burgers, freeze-dried lasagna or
a foil-wrapped stock cube than to have to account for every stage
of preparing her home-made beefburgers, pâtés, cakes
and soups. She even used to bake her own bread, but now buys in
sliced white - it's cheap, convenient and doesn't worry the health
inspectors. "There's no question that the kids are eating less
healthy food these days," she says. "But what's the alternative?"
There are, however, more insidious ways in which
the tyranny of the food safety regime undermines rather than shores
up standards. If you try to regulate every last detail of human
behaviour, the outcome may be very different from the one you intended.
First, it sparks resentment. A barrage of ever
tighter, ever more intrusive guidelines sets up a response that
can be roughly categorised as 'Stuff your rules, I'm doing it my
way.' By alienating those involved in preparing the food, you lose
the support of the very people you need to ensure that it is done
as safely as possible.
Second, you take their eye off the ball. For example,
the cook who is scrupulously filling in every last box on a list
may not have time to pick up on something far riskier - the van-driver,
perhaps, who brings in the daily supplies via an old folk's home,
where there was a recent bout of tummy upsets; the little boy whose
mum delivers him every day from the farm, but who forgets about
hand-washing; or the cleaner who always dumps her wellies just inside
the door.
Most important of all, these strict rules take
responsibility away from the individual, parking it squarely with
the bureaucrats. The cook who ticks every box on her dozen pages
may well conclude that she has done more than enough to safeguard
her kitchen. The rules have been drawn up by others, and if they
are inadequate then it's their fault, not hers.
Blame-transference, as it is known, has been studied
in all sorts of areas, particularly among car-owners. It has now
been well established in traffic experiments that if you remove
road-safety instructions rather than adding to them, drivers will
take greater care and generally be safer. Instead of relying on
a plethora of notices advising them to go slow, stop at traffic
lights and so on, motorists are thrown back on their own resources.
They proceed with far greater attention to other drivers and pedestrians.
The accident statistics fall.
The same is almost certainly true of food safety.
By reducing rather than increasing the guidelines, you would delegate
responsibility to the most important person in the establishment
- the one in charge of the food. You give them the back-up they
need, but you also give them your trust.
Every good cook knows,
or should know, that there are certain basic rules for keeping a
hygienic kitchen. These can be established easily and succinctly,
monitored by occasional inspections and delivered in an atmosphere
of mutual respect. It is the way that Jean and hundreds of other
dedicated school cooks had always run their kitchens, in the days
when E.coli was virtually unknown. They should be allowed to do
so again.
©Magnus Linklater
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