Young Curators – Nutritional Content and Experience of School Food

We started running our first Young Curators programme in October 2024, in partnership with the Museum of the Home, Quadram Institute, the School Meals Project, and Chefs in Schools. Designed to give young people hands-on experience in museums, participants aged 15-18 years old collaborated with museum professionals, academics, and food experts to conduct research that will contribute to our upcoming School Dinners exhibition. You can read more about their October residential trip here.

In our latest blog update, one of our Young Curators, Fearne, explores the nutritional content and experience of school food. 

In my research for the school dinners exhibition, I found out several interesting things. For my research, I wanted to find out about the social and nutritional aspects of school dinners. I feel that socially school dinners are extremely important for student’s relationships with others, independence on how they can choose and experiment with different foods that they might not always get to eat, it also gives students a sense of reliability and trust with schools through things such as free school meals for less fortunate students. I think schools most typically and should give students a filling healthy meal which gives them energy to learn and keeps them eating healthy. I wanted to find out about students’ opinions on school dinners and what they think is important for them in their school dinners.

My research

I completed a nutritional analysis sheet on a day of school meals. The number of choices for meals in a typical day is quite varied so can be accommodating for many students which I find was good for students but not great for my research as the difference of nutritional value could be very different for every student. My choices to analyse had lots of carbohydrates, a significant amount of protein and low in calories. The meal with the highest number of vitamins was the special of the day for lunch which had 3 of your 5 a day. I conducted an interview with one of my classmates about school dinners to get a more personalised opinion and more research into how school lunches were structured and what the environment of these were like. She had an overall positive opinion about school dinners and felt that schools were helpful in accommodating her gluten intolerance. In her old schools she did not have certain meals for special occasions only for things like Christmas meals, I thought this was unusual as in my experience we had lots of occasions of meals for things like Chinese New Year. She explained that school dinners were efficiently structured to make sure every student gets dinner and has a place to eat it before their lesson.

Overall, I think that I found out many interesting things about the environmental and quality aspects of schools meals and it is overall quite high. It seems schools are very careful in considering the nutrient value and healthiness of the foods they are serving.