De l'école à l'abattoir...

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From school to the slaughterhouse

School farms are teaching children about the origins of their food – and supplying tasty sausages




Bibi van der Zee The Guardian, Thursday 29 April 2010 Article history
This little piggy . . . students at Oathall community college with some of its piglets. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

Piglets make a noise like a car alarm if you hold them the wrong way up. Embarrassingly I am the only person here who is surprised by this. The children who are showing me around their school farm laugh and reassure me; it's all perfectly normal to them.

Next Tuesday, some of these pigs will be going to the slaughterhouse to be turned into sausages as part of the Real Sausage Challenge, a national competition for school farms. They will then be judged by a panel that includes Raymond Blanc at the Real Food Festival – a four-day event starting in London at the end of next week.

The sausage-making at Oathall community college farm in West Sussex isn't a one-off event, however. Almost all the animals, which also include cows and hens, are being raised for slaughter, with the end product sold to parents, students and anyone else who asks.

It doesn't seem to faze the students one bit. "You don't really get attached to them," says Pauline Main, 16, one of several dozen students who spend at least three afternoons a week cleaning out the pens, rebedding the pigs and handscrubbing them when they're to be shown at agricultural shows. "When you join, you know where it all goes," adds Samantha Marsland, 16.

Only one student I speak to admits to getting upset about seeing the animals head off to the abattoir. Charlotte Grace, 15, says "sometimes you do get attached to the lambs, especially the orphans. But you get over it. They're not pets, they have to make their living."

All this calmness and realism is in stark contrast to headmistress Andrea Charman's resignation a few months ago when she tried to run a similar project at Lydd primary school in Kent. Pupils there reared lambs, with the idea that the meat would be used as prizes in a raffle. Some parents objected and a campaign began, with an online petition protesting against the "slaughter of Marcus the lamb" attracting 2,500 signatures. Charman has just been reinstated after local parents — rather than the scattered bunch who signed the petition — pleaded with her to return.

But as a result of the furore, School Farms Network and School Food Matters – the organisations behind the Real Sausage Challenge – found that some schools were nervous about getting involved with their project. Ian Egginton-Metters of the School Farms Network says: "The teachers were just too worried about what the parents would say. It's much more of a problem for adults than it is for children."

He is not advocating that schools throw themselves willy-nilly into these kind of projects: "They have to be done with care, with absolute openness and clarity, talking to governors and parents all along the way. You need to introduce children gradually to animals and to what happens." But Egginton-Metters, like all the other food campaigners I speak to, believes that getting children to make contact with animals is one of the most important tools we have to bridge the gulf that has opened up between our kids and their food.

Every campaigner has their own horror story: the children who think their milk starts life in cartons, the school group who say their meat comes from Morrisons. And school farms are more than just a way of getting children back in touch with where their food originates. Egginton-Metters argues that they also provide a kind of hands-on learning that is extraordinarily good at helping children make abstract subjects such as maths and science real. "You can deliver the whole curriculum in a day's farming," he insists. Working with animals can even be therapeutic for some children from difficult backgrounds: "Animals don't reject you."

Howard Wood, the farm head at Oathall, finds that children who work regularly there acquire confidence. "I've seen students who were going to drop out transformed by being here. They'll drive tractors, build fences, take cows out, tag the lambs, things they never knew they could do before."

Currently there are only 82 schools with farms attached in the UK and, while it is obviously impossible for many, 37 more are now looking into it. And Wood gets thousands of visitors a year to his farm. "For years I've been an oddball here on my own, and now suddenly the phone doesn't stop ringing," he says happily.
http://www.guardian.co.uk

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