FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD!

We talk to Stephanie Slater, founder and chief executive of the charity School Food Matters, which campaigns for access to healthy, sustainable food at school and teaches children about food and food growing

- Stephanie Slater

What prompted you to set up the charity? 

I founded the charity in 2007. I founded it because I put my children in the local primary school after living abroad in Australia and when I walked into this rated outstanding primary school in London the first thing I heard was the office manager say, sorry about the smell, that’s lunch!

It was the most appalling food and not only in our school but across the whole London borough. So, I hadn’t realised I was setting up a charity, it was just a grassroots campaign if you like that has grown year on year.

It was in the same breath really that I heard a headteacher at a primary school in Hackney say that children at his school couldn’t identify an onion – not an aubergine or an artichoke, or anything exotic, but a humble onion. It confirmed my suspicion that there was this awful disconnect between food and where it comes from.

I started looking at food education. I’d always grown up around fruit and veg – I was very lucky. I grew up in Birmingham and we always had an outdoor space. When my kids went to nursery school when we still lived in Australia there was a lovely Montessori nursery school where they used to grow lots of produce; children used to harvest it and share it for lunch. It was a magical world and quite unrealistic in state education in the UK. So now back home I started to look around and found that some schools were doing a great job at engaging children with nature, but those with limited space hadn’t really explored what was possible. What we wanted to do as a charity was to make sure every child had access to outdoor learning or to learn food skills, so that’s how it came to pass and 15 years later I’m still on the case.