College kitchens owe us better than this
Jamie Oliver, is of course, too much of a cockney geezer to extend his campaign to bring good, healthy food to schools to include Oxford colleges, and it now seems that this is to our detriment. An Oxford Student investigation has revealed that Oxford colleges have broken food safety laws at least 80 times over the last year.
Of these transgressions, 18 have been described as ‘very serious’, and include such problems as rats found in the yard of Christ Church, food growing mould at Worcester and flies hovering over food at St John’s. It must be said that of those colleges who replied to this newspaper about what measures they had taken since the initial reports had been made, all had taken the necessary steps to ensure that these problems were rectified. For that they should be commended.
Only Worcester, Keble, Trinity and St Hilda’s, however, have so far replied to us regarding the improvements they had to make. All four have apparently made the corrections reccomended by the police reports. We do not know whether or not the other colleges have made the necessary changes. Although, had this paper not carried out its initial investigation, we would not know that they were suffering from problems in the first place.
The point is that Oxford colleges occupy a strange place in the commercial market. They charge for the service they provide, but they hold an utterly captive customer base. While they should be commended for providing generally cheap food to students, they need to accept the responsibility that comes from the fact that few students can afford to eat elsewhere.
It would not be acceptable for college kitchens to violate the food safety act even if the breaches were more minor than our investigation has uncovered. They have a duty of care to a student body largely unable to go elsewhere for their food even once they do know that their health could be at risk for doing so. Jamie Oliver has shown that feeding young children well makes them achieve far more, and behave much better at school.
Perhaps even if colleges are unmotivated by their own sense of responsibility to students’ own well-being, the unrelenting drive of tutors to ensure that their undergraduates propel them towards the top of the Norrington Table will guarantee that they take food preparation a little more seriously in future.
19th Jan 2006