The aim of the Day was to increase awareness of the need for children globally to be served at least one healthy meal a day.
Plans for the inaugural day followed a visit by LACA chair Anne Bull to her US counterpart last year when they agreed that school meals provider groups across the world should liaise to put forward advice and ideas to promote nutritional school meals.
“This first ISM Day is a platform to build on and expand,” Bull told a LACA seminar in Manchester on March 8th when more than 100 delegates heard that initial feedback showed 28 schools across Britain and America had connected up for the day and a quarter of a million tweets had been aired.
The seminar brought together professional school meal service and child well-being managers dealing with nutrition, hunger and obesity. It aimed to examine the impact of diet-related illnesses, the importance of school meals for youngsters’ health and measures being taken around the world to tackle health inequality.
Expert speakers from the US and Denmark highlighted their school policies in their countries aimed at giving children quality food daily with research showing that this meal intake improved learning skills and behaviour. Other actions were being taken to combat obesity.
The School Food and Hunger in Modern Society presentation on the work of Dr Katie Wilson of the National Food Service Management Institute at the University of Mississippi impressed delegates.
Details of Danish research into nutrition, physical ability and obesity were provided by Professor Bent Egberg of Aalborg University.
Alarming figures on child poverty were highlighted by Matthew Reed of the Children’s Society, while Manchester Labour MP Kate Green, who said she had been impressed by the UK meals service after a school visit, told LACA that its members should continue their good work and promote it across the country “as illustrated with the campaigning force of this international day”.
Sylvia Cheater, an independent public health adviser, gave case studies showing how initiatives and intervention in the north west region had made a difference by using an integrated approach to school services.
She urged caterers to “come up over the parapet and shout about what you are achieving”.
Unilever marketing manager James Allred outlined his company’s target to provide 150,000 school meals to Indonesian children and how British schools could give backing to the campaign.