Quick bites: the new school dinners
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It’s almost 10 years since sloppy school canteens were shamed by the documentary Jamie’s School Dinners for pumping schoolkids with additives, fat and Turkey Twizzlers. Since then, according to a report from the Fabian Commission on food and poverty last month, school dinners appear to have improved. Still, the incidence of child obesity, the report notes, is rising in the “lowest income households”; 22 per cent of boys and 21 per cent of girls in low-income households were classified as obese in 2013.
In Tottenham Green, north London, where more than 40 per cent of 11-year-olds are obese, a new restaurant, Chicken Town, is due to open in September that takes a different view of the problem. Instead of trying to swerve school children’s appetites towards a virtuous vegetable diet they may be disinclined to, Chicken Town will serve “healthy fast fried food” at low prices that compete with the neighbouring temptations at chicken shops and burger joints. “Healthy fast food” sounds like an oxymoron but as Ben Rymer, director of Chicken Town, has said of the project: “The chicken is the carrot to get the kids to eat carrots.” It has even recruited executive chef Giorgio Ravelli, who has worked at prestigious restaurants such as The Ledbury and The Clove Club. The latter is one of Chicken Tom’s mentoring “restaurant partners”, which also include Polpo and Quo Vadis.
Run by the arts charity Create, which develops artist-led projects and social enterprises that engage with London neighbourhoods, the Chicken Town idea has been trialled over the past few years via “healthy fast food” trucks parked close to schools in Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets. The trucks serve lower-fat foods than simple fried chicken, such as jerk chicken burgers and chicken stew, for example.
“This is more than a restaurant that does fried chicken better,” Hadrian Garrard, director of Create, says. “It’s a new model for a social restaurant that helps a community to support its young people. Every penny spent by our customers will subsidise healthier meals for young people in Tottenham, which will be sold at the same price as any chicken shop on the high street.”
Chicken Town has raised £265,000 in capital via Haringey Council and the Mayor of London but launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign last week to raise a further £50,000, required for cooking equipment such as fryers with filtration, to ensure a lower fat content. The restaurant itself, which will be in a former fire station on Tottenham Green, with an interior by Peter & Paul, will be not for profit. It will offer “junior specials” to school-age children for £2, partly funded by the evening service.
createlondon.org; chicken-town.co.uk
Photograph: Green Lions
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