ame Prue Leith’s call for lunchboxes to be banned in schools has prompted a strong reaction from readers, many of whom accused her of pushing the state further into territory that should be left to parents.

The 86-year-old former Great British Bake Off judge said she wanted to see free, compulsory school meals for every child, and admitted her proposal to ban packed lunches altogether was “draconian” – but argued lunchbox contents simply can’t be policed.

From September, children whose families are on universal credit will be eligible for free school meals as part of a wider overhaul of school food standards.

But for many readers, the proposal crossed a line. Several accused ministers and campaigners of treating parents as incapable of making their own decisions, warning of a slippery slope from age verification to government portals monitoring what children eat.

Others pointed to more practical issues – allergies, religious dietary needs and school kitchens without the space or budget to cope.

Here’s what you had to say:

I see the reasoning behind this argument, but it seems impractical to the extent of being wrong. Some children have food allergies and it is likely to be impossible for school-dinner providers to cope with all of them. A much larger number of children have very strong views about what they will not eat, and it is impossible, and undesirable, to legislate against this. To do so would lead many children simply to reject what they are given, and so go hungry or insufficiently fed. Bans and compulsory eating are not a caring way forward.

Great idea. We are already telling parents how to parent with online age verification, etc. Let’s force parents to scan their Tesco receipts to prove they’re not buying sweets. Let’s force parents to take pictures and send them to a government portal every night to prove they’re feeding their kids healthy food. Let’s fine them if they don’t adhere. Let’s weigh kids and fine parents if their kids are overweight or underweight. Let’s pull blood from kids and test their vitamin etc counts – fine parents if it’s not correct. Let’s fine parents if the kids’ teeth aren’t healthy. Let’s fine parents if their kids have too much acne because the parents aren’t forcing their kids to wash their faces.

We’re already heading that way – let’s keep the momentum going! Dystopian nightmare here we come…

I applaud the principle. This should simply be the case.

BUT.

There is a whole list of problems with this.

Halal, vegetarian, kosher, allergies – and that’s the easy ones.

Kids can be taught to like foods they initially hate, but parents being persuaded? That’s the tricky bit.

Now, the really hard bit. The costs, the infrastructure, the capacity.

Does every school have fully standards-compliant space, and enough cooks to do it?

Do we have sufficient raw foodstuff to produce it?

School meals are presumably healthier today than the high-calorie, low-cost stuff we had when I was at school, but cheapness is always going to be a defining factor of school meals. There might be more veg and fewer burgers, but if you want assurance your child is actually getting quality food (or food that meets dietary requirements), then packed lunches are really the only guarantee.

And sure, some parents will pack lunches that don’t represent suitable nutrition, but when did we stop expecting any amount of parental responsibility? A parent who is happy to stuff their kid’s lunch with chocolate and other unhealthy food probably isn’t serving them sensible evening meals, breakfasts, snacks etc, so banishing the packed lunch is unlikely to solve childhood obesity.

By all means make school lunches free and healthy, but increasingly draconian state control of children’s diets is not going to solve any problems and would probably backfire in a number of ways.

“Oh won’t somebody think of the children!?” is increasingly becoming the rallying cry for introducing creeping government restrictions on our daily lives in the UK, and we need to take a step back from this nanny-state thinking, where responsibility is being taken out of the hands of those best placed to manage such things (parents) in favour of half-baked government mandates.

I don’t know where the nostalgia for school dinners comes from. Maybe they’ve improved since I was that age, but in my experience they were awful – stodge, lumpy mash and veg with the life boiled out of it. School meals have to find a balance between being nutritious and being something children will enjoy eating. There’s no point in them if they are so puritan that it turns children off healthy eating.

Since Covid, the schools here have begun to routinely serve junk food.

For a fraction of the price of £1,200 for school meals for two children per year, we give them nutritious packed lunches.

(Meanwhile, those parents without jobs, with plenty of time to prepare a packed lunch, get free school meals.)

So no thanks, we don’t want Labour’s compulsory school meals, which one way or another I’d be made to pay for.

Making them compulsory would just mean more food going into the pig bin. So it was in my boyhood, even though parents were paying for them.

If kids don’t fancy the meals, they won’t eat them. End of. Sooner than eat anything unappealing or unfamiliar, they will just go hungry and make up for it by eating a bit more in the evening.

I only had school lunches at infants school. Went to my grandma’s at junior school as she lived nearby. Tried high school lunches – too many eggs, so I went home for lunch, a home-cooked meal waited for me. Children are not allowed to do this nowadays. My children all mainly had a packed lunch: sandwich, crisps, chocolate biscuit or cake, apple and drink. None of them are overweight adults. However good the meals are, children will only eat what is familiar and liked.

We have freedom in this country – Prue can’t tell us not to have packed lunches. She doesn’t get to say what kids eat or what parents feed them. Kids are allergic to many things, and some won’t eat everything.

I used to work in a school and was horrified by the food combinations the catering staff considered appropriate: chips were regularly offered with pizza or macaroni cheese, for example, and spaghetti hoops were considered to be a vegetable.

Anyway, they didn’t have space in the dining room for 2,000 pupils to eat a sit-down meal in an hour – it would have had to be huge, and a space that would be wasted for the rest of the day.

Some of the comments have been edited for this article for brevity and clarity.

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