Primary School vs. Elementary School: Food Edition
What’s the difference between the food in Primary schools in England and Elementary schools in the USA?
Luckily, we’ve got a kid-consultant who has attended a few schools in the US and England on the case to help us. If you’re a parent with a kid who is moving to England, here’s what they want to know!
A couple of notes before we get started:
First, we’re comparing free (non-paid tuition) schools open to the available public in both countries.
Second, we recognise that all schools are different. Some have catering that is better than others. So we won’t focus on specific meals, but things that we know to be generalised across the countries.
What is snack time like?
In the US, schools generally say that they want kids to bring in a healthy snack. However, a blind eye is often turned to cookies and other unhealthy snacks. It’s more common to have an unhealthy snack than a healthy one in many schools! Almost everybody brings a snack or pools snacks with the class.
In the UK, snacks are generally more healthy. Cookies/Biscuits would not be tolerated at most schools for a snack. Not everyone brings a snack. We think this because lunch is usually more filling. Typical snacks include healthy fruit snacks, fruit or a sandwich. Sometimes a bag of crips sneaks in as a snack.
The school lunch calendar
In both countries, it’s always possible to eat a hot meal served at the school or to bring in a lunch from home (aka “cold lunch”).
American schools usually publish a school lunch calendar on brightly coloured paper with a suitable theme for the month (pumpkins for October, turkey for November). Kids don’t have to sign up for which meal they would like in advance.
The calendar provides varied meals but most schools have one day of the week as their designated pizza day. Every American who has been to a typical Elementary school knows the joy of a rectangle pizza!
English schools very often outsource their meals to a catering company. This sounds extravagant but these are catering companies focused on kids’ lunches, so think more sandwiches and less smoked salmon! Because the catering companies try to predict their costs, usually parents have to book a meal in advance online.
The catering companies usually provide meal plans weeks in advance but there is less variation to the meals when compared to American lunches. Often there’s one day of the week that’s for some kind of pasta, another day of the week for English Breakfast day and another for pies (shepherd or chicken). Back-up meals consist of jacket potatoes or sandwiches. There’s always a vegetarian and halal option but there is no pizza day!
So what are the meals actually like?
In America, students aren’t afforded any special requests about their meals. A serving of spaghetti sauce is a serving of spaghetti sauce and nobody gets anything different. In England, students can usually ask for more or less of a certain thing. So a serving of spaghetti sauce might be different based on that student’s request.
Similarly, in the States, students also aren’t able to reject having a vegetable on their plate. In England, they seem to trust that students will eat some vegetable so they allow kids to skip the broccoli if they want and assume that they’ll put on more carrots.
American meals tend to be more store-bought. You won’t find any disposable packaging on English lunches! For example, if an American school serves ice cream, it usually comes in a self-serving paper tub. If an English school serves ice cream, it’s scooped out into bowls.
What’s to drink?
Anyone who thinks of lunch in an Elementary school in America knows the answer here: milk or chocolate milk in tiny cartons!
In England, it’s usually pitchers of water that sit a the lunch tables and are poured into cups.
In both countries, kids usually carry refillable water bottles which can be used at lunch.
Our Advice
As long as your kid isn’t a super picky eater, give English school lunches (or dinners!) a try. Most kids opt for the hot meal and it can help your kid acclimate to the tastes of Britain faster! Make sure you sign up for the catering service’s booking plan and connect a direct debit. If you’re nervous about how they’ll react to the new tastes, slip a granola bar or something familiar in their rucksack!
