考研资料：2011经济学家期刊文章精选十八
School mealsEat up your greens
Dec 2nd 2004 From The Economist print edition
Can school meals be appetising, nutritious and profitable?
PUPILS, like soldiers, march on their stomachs. A well-nourished child is more likely to be a studious one. But food has been seen as a cost to be cut, rather than an ingredient of good schooling. That may now be changing: as the government worries about obesity—which is rising fast among children—and urges everyone to eat less salt, fat and sugar, and more fruit and vegetables, the paucity and unhealthiness of most school meals is striking. But cash constraints and rules on public-sector contracts make improvement hard.
Since cost-cutting began in the 1980s, quality has fallen along with food budgets. More and more children have chosen to bring packed lunches, spend their dinner money on fast food or skip lunch altogether. Now only half the pupils who could eat school meals do so. As numbers fall, the overheads become more burdensome and the pressure on ingredients greater. Of a typical £1.20-1.30 ($2.30-2.50) charged for a primary-school meal, labour costs account for 55p, equipment another 5p, administration charges up to 15p and profit 8p, according to Paul Kelly of Compass, a leading catering company. That leaves barely 40p for the ingredients. By contrast, a prison would spend 60p (per adult). The Dragon School in Oxford, a top junior school in the private sector, spends 75p per child and a hospital 90p.
The easiest way to get more children into the school dining room is to offer fast food, like chips and pizza—but that conflicts with improving nutrition. What is both tasty and good for you is likely to be more expensive. One way round that would be to cut labour costs—which is impossible thanks to a government directive which says that workers in privatised services must have the same terms and conditions as they would have enjoyed in the public sector.
All this is no fun for contractors, whose margins are being squeezed. Compass and another big firm, Rentokil Initial, a conglomerate with its roots in rodent control, have complained that they are finding the primary-school business unattractive. “We have decided not to go into that market,” says Mr Pollard of Avenance, an upmarket catering firm which mainly works for state hospitals and independent schools. “We cannot provide the right food to put on a child's plate for 42p. The government has made the effort with hospital food, but has yet do so with schools.”
Some local authorities are getting fed up too. Essex County Council has given its 600 schools direct charge of catering. That has been good news for some—chiefly large ones, or those able to form clusters in order to negotiate good deals. But it is bad news for small schools in remote areas, who benefited from a cross-subsidy under the old scheme. Around 75 of them have given up offering hot meals.
It is not just about money, says Neil Porter of the Local Authority Caterers' Association, who notes that school meals are only 15% of a child's annual food intake. It is unrealistic, he says, to think that they are the key to delivering better nutrition. “Children live in a processed-food culture with at least two generations of parents who cannot cook and are themselves unfamiliar with certain foods,” he says. “The vast majority of children will not eat in school what they do not recognise and do not eat outside of school.”
和士兵们一样，学生要吃饱肚子才能正常学习。一个营养全面的孩子往往更有可能会成为一个勤奋认真的孩子。不过，食品被认为是一项可以削减的成本，而不是良好的学校教育的组成部分。这种状况现在可能在渐渐改变：由于政府担心孩子中愈演愈烈的肥胖问题而要求每个人都少吃点盐、脂肪和糖，多吃些水果和蔬菜，多数学校餐饮的量少和不卫生问题已凸现出来。但是资金限制以及公共部门合同条款使得进展缓慢。
从80年代开始削减成本起，质量也随着食品预算的减少而下降。越来越多的孩子选择了自带午饭、以快餐代替正餐或者干脆就不吃午饭。如今，打算在学校就餐的小学生中只有一半真的在学校吃。因为人数减少，固定费用就更难以承担，营养构成方面也就压力更大了。根据业界领先的公共餐饮公司Compass的Paul Kelly所说，在一份价值₤1.20-1.30(合$2.30-2.50)的典型小学生午饭中，劳动力成本占55便士，设备占5便士，管理费用约15便士，而利润为8便士。这就给营养成分仅仅剩下40便士。相反，同样是营养构成部分，监狱花在每个成年人身上是60便士。顶尖的私立初中The Dragon School in Oxford平均每个孩子身上花费75便士，而医院为每个人的花费是90便士。
最容易让更多孩子走进学校食堂的办法是提供快餐，像薯片和比萨等—然而这与改善营养是相悖的。既可口又有益身体健康的往往要更贵一些。一个捷径可能是削减劳动力成本—不过这看来是不太可能的，因为政府指令要求私有机构中的工人必须与其在公共部门可能享有的条件一致。
所有这些对经营者来说丝毫没有乐趣可言，他们的利润被无限压榨。Compass及另一个立足于营养控制的集团公司Rentokil Initial都抱怨说发现私立学校的生意没什么吸引力。主要服务于国立医院和私立学校的高档餐饮企业Avenance的Pollard先生说，“我们已经决定不涉入这一市场，我们不可能以42便士给孩子的餐盘里提供合适的食物。政府已经在医院食品问题上有所成就，不过在学校方面仍需加强。”
一些地方权威机构也逐渐厌倦了。Essex郡议会已经对其管辖的600所学校发放直接餐饮补贴费用。这对有些学校来说的确是个好消息—主要是大型学校，或那些为了利于交易协商有能力形成联合体的学校。不过对地处偏远、一向从旧体制下的交叉补贴中受益的小学校来说却是坏消息。其中约有75个已经放弃提供热餐。
地方当局餐饮协会的Neil Porter称这并不仅仅是钱的问题，学校膳食只占一个孩子年食物摄入的15%。他说，指望学校膳食能带来更好的营养水平是不现实的。他还说，“孩子们生活在一个加工食品的文化之中，其至少两代家长都不会烹饪，而且家长本身都对一些食物很不熟悉。孩子中的绝大多数不会在学校吃他们不认识的东西，也不在校外吃。”
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