Food Museum in Stowmarket launches new exhibition on the history of school dinners

From spam fritters and cottage pie to turkey twizzlers and fish and chip Fridays — a town’s museum is serving up nostalgia with its new exhibition all about school dinners.

The Food Museum in Stowmarket is inviting visitors to join the lunch line with its School Dinners Exhibition which is open to the public today.

Thought to be the first of its kind in the UK, the exhibition not only offers a spoonful of nostalgia but also a deeper look at how school meals have evolved over the decades.

From classic dishes to high-profile celebrity campaigns and Government policy changes, the exhibition was officially opened by Sharon Hodgson MP, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for School Food and explores the impact of school food on British culture and society.

It also shines a spotlight on the people behind the meals — including Jeanette Orrey MBE, known as ‘The Dinner Lady’, whose work co-founding Food for Life helped to inspire Jamie Oliver’s school food revolution.

“I’m absolutely blown away by what’s on offer here,” Jeanette said. “It’s just fantastic to see the history of school dinners presented in this way.

“When I first started as catering manager at St Peter's Primary School in Nottinghamshire during the 1980s, we were cooking everything from scratch which was great and we had a really supportive supervisor at the time.

“But later on, that all changed with the introduction of Compulsory Competitive Tendering — everything became frozen, everything was out of a packet and it was all done for as cheap as possible.”

Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government faced criticism for ‘milk snatching’ during the 1980s, but its policies also impacted school meals.

With the introduction of competitive tenders, private contractors provided cheaper, lower-quality meals and nutritional standards were relaxed to cut costs and as a result, canteens across the country saw a rise in fast-food-style school meals like pizza, chips and chicken nuggets.

“It just wasn’t good enough,” Jeanette said: “We had to do something.”

The dinner lady introduced healthier meals at her school which later inspired Jamie Oliver's campaign to improve school food — leading to the removal of the infamous turkey twizzlers from menus.

In 2003, Jeanette co-founded Food for Life which promotes meals cooked from scratch and teaching children to cook and grow their own food.

She later published her cookbook, ‘The Dinner Lady’, and now serves as a School Meals Policy Advisor to the Soil Association and co-chairs the School Food Plan Alliance.

She now hopes further campaigning will lead to an increase in the Government's Universal Infant Free School Meals (UIFSM) rate which currently allocates £2.58 per school meal.

She said: “It’s really just not enough. That £2.58 is to cover everything, not just the food on the plate.

“Caters across the country are doing the best they possibly can with what they’ve got, but I would like to see the Government increase their spending on this — you have to remember, the school meal is about more than just the food.

“Sitting around a table, using a knife and fork properly, talking to others while eating — they are invaluable skills that all children should learn and I hope this exhibition opens up that conversation.”

The School Dinners exhibition, supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Arts Council England and sponsor Thomas Ridley, will be open to the public until February 25, 2027.

Curated by Katherine Bridges and developed with museum director Jenny Cousins, the exhibition was created in partnership with seven young curators from across the UK.

Katherine said: “It is a result of visitor feedback as people have been asking us to do something about school dinners for years.

"We’ve been working on this for about two years and it’s been a really big project for us.

“We hope it’s a comprehensive exhibition where people can reflect on their own school food memories and experiences, while also learning something new.

“Being the curator has been such a privilege and it’s so exciting to finally share everything with visitors.”

With food being a core factor of the exhibition, museum visitors will be invited to sample free tasters inspired by historical menus from the 1940s up to the present day.

Items on display include vintage lunch boxes, dinner lady uniforms and even signed artwork from the Grange Hill TV series.

For further information and to plan your visit, follow this link: www.foodmuseum.org.uk/events/school-dinners/.

During her welcoming speech, Sharon Hodgson MP said: “I would like to personally thank the Food Museum for all their hard work to make this happen.

“There is no better time to be talking about school dinners than right now.

“We know that ministers are keen to focus on this issue and I look forward to working with everyone involved in this area of work to give this exhibition the national stage it so rightly deserves.”