Eating their words: What's cooking in Indian schools

The reinstatement of a nine-year-old British student’s blog about canteen fare that was sought to be stifled by her school authorities, should give Indian proscribers of free speech some food for thought.

Though she had rated some meals highly, her comments and photographs revealed the largely dismal fare dished out to schoolchildren in her small Scottish town. That her blog went viral after the inevitable ban by the local council because it ‘upset’ the canteen staff, should further discourage advocates of gag orders worldwide.

The incident is relevant to India as midday meals doled out in countless schools here only make headlines when children fall ill due to unexpected additions to their fare including lizards and roaches.

But even what passes as ‘normal’ is unlikely to withstand public scrutiny in terms of nutrition, culinary standards or hygiene. Since most hapless Indian children in such schools do not have recourse to blogs as the little Scottish girl, it may be worth someone’s while to do a tasting tour of a wide range of such institutions and put up the results on a blog.

Denials by the concerned authorities and accusations of elitist bias could be allayed by collating the opinion of the children who consume those meals on a daily basis.

Or adaily cell-phone photo of lunch can be posted to a common site. India does not have the equivalent of a celebrity chef like Jamie Oliver who has made it his mission to improve the quality of school meals in Britain by demonstrating that tastier, healthier food need not be more expensive.

The need for such a culinary messiah to take up the spatula — not just the cudgels — for Indian school kids is obvious, considering that a former Union minister for women and child development actually sought to substitute cooked meals with packaged fortified biscuits in 2008.