Mark Dolan: Children deserve better than school banning meat and replacing it with processed vegan rubbish

Welcome to bonkers Britain. The Sun are reporting that students at Barrowford Primary School near Nelson, Lancashire have taken meat off the menu.

Pupils are only offered vegetarian dinners, and mums and dads, are even being discouraged to send their little ones in with meat or fish, in their packed lunch. The head teacher of the school, Rachel Tomlinson, said she had made the decision to offer only vegetarian lunches, to "stop climate change".

She went on to say "Our children learn about the principles of sustainable development as part of the national curriculum, and are really interested in how they can contribute to better looking after our environment.

"We made our school lunches meat free to demonstrate how each of us making a small change to our daily habits, can have a much wider positive impact, and that reducing meat consumption, is just one way to do this”.

Give me strength. Whatever happened to teaching them writing, reading and arithmetic?

Over the last two years, have our little people not suffered enough? Needless school closures, for which there is scant evidence, the spread of Covid was reduced, have affected children's mental health, their academic development, their self-confidence, and of course ultimately their life chances.

Stuck on a laptop, if the family was lucky enough to own one, watching Zoom lessons, of haphazard quality. They couldn't interact with their friends, see their teachers face-to-face, or even pick up a football and have a kickabout in the local park. In fact, local parks had their own bizarre rules, including the truly dystopian image, of taped up playgrounds, whose gates were bolted shut.

And of course, children as young as 11, have been wearing face coverings for months on end, all day long in the classroom. I honestly can't understand the mentality of a teacher, who thinks it's either necessary, or in any way acceptable, to cover the faces of children, particularly, with those scientifically debatable masks.

Some of our teachers have been heroic. But if you’re a teacher that thinks school closures were justified and proportionate, then I suggest, you're in the wrong occupation. If I was a schoolteacher, I would have wanted full classrooms, throughout the pandemic. I would've confiscated every single face mask.

It begs the question, how many people working in education,actually like kids? Well, actions speak louder than words. And now with this policy, of literally taking nutritious food off their plates, we are damaging them further. It's like taking candy from a child. Children, who faced negligible threat from the virus, were the foot soldiers in this pandemic, all to protect grandma. What a sick role reversal.

Using kids as cannon fodder is something I can't find precedent for, anywhere in our history. Call this a wonderful, enlightened generation. Do me a favour. Any society that doesn't put kids first, is no society at all.

What we have done to children over the last two years, will be lasting, and not forgotten. So now, children are to be the foot soldiers, in tackling climate change, and the way we're going to do that, is to interfere with their nutrition, just as we are in the grip of a childhood obesity crisis. Well done everyone.

One parent featured in the Sun article raged, that the new meal plan, was brought in "ages ago", and she has only just found out why her daughter was talking about the "disgusting" new sausages at school.

She says: “my daughter ordered sausage and mash, and when she bit into her sausage she said 'eww'.. She ended up just having mash for her dinner. I'm fuming”

And so she should be. Another parent said "No wonder my kids are starving and raid the fridge before the shoes are off.

"Vegetarian is a choice for when they are older."

How right they are. Do you have any idea, what a litany of horrors, lurk within these highly processed vegetarian and vegan foods?

Now of course, there are families and kids, who go vegetarian by choice, sometimes for cultural, moral or religious reasons. No problem. But the clear direction of travel, is to brainwash wash our kids, into ultimately going plant based. Except that any nutritionist worth their salt, will tell you kids need protein, to grow up strong and healthy. And the most bio available, easily absorbed source of protein for the body, is animal protein. Meat, fish, eggs, dairy. Don’t take my word for it.

The Mail write that putting your children on a trendy vegan diet makes them grow up short and with weaker bones according to a study..Researchers found that children aged five to ten, who eat plant-based diets, are on average three centimetres shorter than those who eat meat.Their bones were also smaller and less strong, putting the children at risk of fractures, or osteoporosis, in later life. The study, by University College London's Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, said parents must be aware of the risks of vegan diets.

The authors said vegan children should be given vitamin B12 and vitamin D supplements, to reduce potentially long-term health consequences of being raised on plants only.

It’s not a ringing endorsement, is it?

And the environmental argument of a plant based diet is debatable too, with staple items like corn, wheat, soy and grains requiring vast monocrop agriculture, at odds with the cycle of nature, and requiring vast amounts of chemical fertilisers and pesticides.

Not to mention the packaging and processing of these horrible fake meat products. If there’s one thing we've learnt during this pandemic, it's that we've got to put children first.

And that starts with proper balanced nutrition, and three square meals a day, including at school. They deserve better than this processed rubbish.

Take these vegetarian bangers. How many stars would I give that out of five? Not a sausage.