Case study: North Cerney

07 May 2005 by
Case study: North Cerney

The plates the kids' meals arrived on may have looked bright, but North Cerney head teacher Bridget Goodrich knew there was nothing clever about how her children in the village primary school, just north of Cirencester in Gloucestershire, were being fed.

"The meals were being cooked in a large school [in Cirencester] by untrained dinner ladies, then put in yellow-plastic divided plates and driven for 45 minutes - until they got here congealed and often cold," she says. A member of staff was paid to wash the dishes, another to serve the food, and yet another to collect the dinner money.

At the same time as Goodrich was scratching her head, James Walker, the publican at the Bathurst Arms across the road, was visiting a food festival in Abergavenny. There, he heard TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall give an inspirational lecture on the importance of good food, and found himself sitting next to the superhero of school-dinner makeovers, Jeanette Orrey. Two conversations later (and having discovered that Fearnley-Whittingstall is an alumnus of the North Cerney school), Walker, inevitably, felt moved to action.

Next week will see the first school meals being cooked for the children of North Cerney (24 of the school's 38 pupils will be taking the meal) by the kitchens of the pub. Dishes planned include chicken-and-ham pie with leek; tuna-and-sweetcorn pasta bake; sweet-and-sour pork with rice and pineapple; fresh tomato-and-basil soup; and chicken and vegetable paella with saffron rice.

"The food will be a minimum of fuss, with veg incorporated to encourage the kids to eat it," says Walker. "For us, the whole point was that it didn't take up too much time. We have 11 chefs here and serve about 200 at Sunday lunch and 120 at Saturday lunch. Obviously, weekdays are quieter, but we still serve 70. The kids' food all has to be away by 12 o'clock."

Parents pay £8.25 per week, and by doubling-up jobs - Goodrich simply employs someone to pick the food up and serve it (and has invested in a dishwasher) - the school has kept costs down. Kids get a sense of mealtimes, eating with adults and at tables set with flowers. Puddings, though, are made in the school.

Instead of a restaurant's usual 70% profit target, Walker calculates that he will run the project at 30% to cover energy and other overheads. "Remember," says Walker, "the contract caterers are running as a business too, but unlike them we don't need to go around trying to save on everything. Here, for instance, the kids will have very good, lean, beef mince."

Having a fairly large operation, Walker has to source his fresh produce from Mise En Place in Cirencester. Stephen Wheeler, the supplier's proprietor, says that about 30% of his produce comes from local farmers, but adds: "More and more, we are being led by gastropubs and hotels demanding local produce."

Walker recognises that he could seek to set up even more local supply chains but he has detected difficulties. "We do a large menu for a large number of customers, so we need consistency," he says. "What happens when a small farmer runs out? What do you do?"

He adds that a small farm just north of the village always e-mails him to tell him what it can supply. "Every month, it's the same - we haven't got any sirloins or fillets," he says. "Restaurants still haven't got to the stage where they know what to do with the rest of it." The challenge, he admits, is for the kitchen to learn new butchery skills. "It is something we want to invest in for the future," he adds.

For the time being, however, the food chain is certainly being thrust right under the teachers' noses. "We wanted this to be a community-based project, to work with the community and buy in local expertise," Goodrich says. "It is about control - bringing it back into the village."

Eventually, part of the playground and school playing field will be turned over to growing the school's vegetables, and chickens will be reared to lay the school's eggs. As well as helping with that, and learning from it, the children will take it in turns to visit the pub's kitchen to learn to make bread and pasta.

"There is a lot of farming and produce round here," says Goodrich, "and the aim is that the produce will eventually come from that land, so the kids can see where it comes from. It is a holistic approach."

Source: Caterer & Hotelkeeper magazine, 07 April 2005

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