Part 3 - 'Return of the Lunches'

Right, I promise that the final part in this trilogy won't fall foul of the usual cinematic law of diminishing returns (Home Alone 3 anyone?) So where were we? Ah yes, we had secured the services of a high end caterer, one more used to weddings than schools, so the staff were definitely happy with the quality of the meals. The pupils, on the other hand, were less so.

I was determined to make this arrangement work, but even I was losing hope when our next move was made for us. Towards the end of the academic year, about the time when our contract was up for renewal, our lunch provider informed us that they had secured a contract for catering to a large country house so they would not be able to sign up for another year with us. This was getting silly!

Luckily, we had heard of a local chef in our nearest town who was trying to grow his business, so we approached him with our fingers and toes crossed. He seemed committed (seemed being the operative word) and after visiting his kitchen I genuinely thought that we might have found someone who would work with us, long term.

Cut to about a month into the new school year, when the chef himself was serving our children, happily chatting away with them about their likes and dislikes. I was walking past him when I heard one of our year 6 children, who we will call Artie for the purposes of this story, loudly exclaim to him ‘I can’t eat that, I am allergic to strawberries!’ Artie was very intelligent and loved talking to adults, but he hadn’t quite understood the definition of allergic. He wasn’t allergic, of course, and talking to his mum we found out that he had once had an upset stomach after eating too many pick your own strawberries from a nearby farm. 

Despite our protestations, this was enough for the Chef to immediately withdraw his services, with the excuse that he was too worried about the impact of what might have happened so he didn’t want it to happen for real (pick the bones out of that if you can.)

A couple of phone calls later, and after consuming quite a bit of humble pie, guess where we ended up? You are correct, we re-signed with the secondary school that we originally left at the start of our quest to improve our children’s meals. Luckily, their service had improved significantly by now, so I was comfortable with signing up with them, although we didn’t have a lot of choice.

Thus ends our saga. 

Or does it?

Obviously not, or I wouldn't be asking this question, would I? More to come...