School dinners are a minefield, as Jamie Oliver discovered when he came up against mothers defiantly pushing burgers through the fence to their chicken-nugget deprived offspring. It’s fine to change your curriculum, sack your headteacher, flatten buildings and replace them with uglier ones, but mess with the lunches and you’d better put on your tin hat.

So when MUSE school in Calabasas, California, decided to become the first school in the US to switch to an all-vegan menu – starting this autumn – it’s no surprise that reactions were forceful. A whopping 40% of the students were withdrawn by concerned parents – though numbers recovered and are now the highest on record, according to head of the school Jeff King.

The private school, founded in 2006 by actress and environmental campaigner Suzy Amis Cameron and her sister, Rebecca Amis, also faced accusations from some US critics of looking after the health of its tiny group of privileged children while the mass of poorer students endured inadequate diets in the public school system.



It’s been a bumpy ride, though the school stuck to its principles and never questioned its stance – “not one time,” says King. The move to a vegan diet was prompted not by ethical or animal rights concerns (hence its preference for the term “plant-based” rather than vegan and no rules banning leather shoes), but by a belief that the school could not live up to its founding principle of environmental sustainability and maintain an animal diet.

King says: “We teach our students how much more land and water are needed to produce a pound of beef versus grain, and we couldn’t truly call ourselves sustainable without eating this way.”



Students at MUSE school in California use the planting of crops to learn about sustainability. Photograph: MUSE school

The school, which sources almost half its produce from its own gardens, announced plans to move to entirely plant-based lunches and snacks – a programme it calls One Meal a Day for the Planet – over two years. “It wasn’t easy,” King says. “There was a lot of fear, especially with parents of younger children, around brain development and how it relates to meat consumption. Our census took a hit: in the first year we lost a lot of families because of this.”

The school worked hard to counter concerns, including fighting back at what it says is intense meat and dairy-industry lobbying. “If you do something like this, you have to be prepared for the parents to get upset and attack you with misinformation,” says King. In the US, “the corporations are running school lunches: they get our kids addicted to sugar, salt and fat … The meat and dairy industry control a lot of the airwaves in the US – you’ll see ads daily for how healthy meat and dairy are”. Milk, he argues, is neither necessary nor healthy.



Nutritional concerns were not the only issue for parents at MUSE: many took a view that the school had no place dictating diet. “Their position was ‘my kid, my choice’,” says school spokeswoman Jennifer Mau. “Food is very personal for people and you’re having someone make that choice for you.”

With the plant-based menu now in place for two months, and students – who helped road-test the dishes – enjoying meals such as burritos, vegetarian chilli and lemon garlic pasta, food at MUSE has become “a non-issue”, King says. The school’s next steps include inviting parents to take part in or sign up the whole family to the programme, with the possibility of eventually extending to the local community and beyond. Public reaction has generally been positive, says the head, though he acknowledges that blazing a trail doesn’t mean others – however admiring – will follow.

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MUSE, though a pioneer in adopting a vegan menu, is not the first school to weather the challenges of a strict food policy. Across the pond, St Christopher school (St Chris) was founded 100 years ago in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, on progressive principles including child-led learning, no homework and vegetarianism.



“The school was an ideological experiment,” says headteacher Richard Palmer. While there is some uncertainty over the origins of the meat-free policy, it appears to have been implemented to ensure students and staff of all faiths and persuasions could eat the same food together.



A century later, the school still serves a vegetarian lunch menu. On the day the Guardian visited, students were hoovering up an immaculately spiced veggie tagine prepared by Moroccan head chef Mohammed Essakhi. “Vegetarian food takes imagination and spices,” says Essakhi, who also serves up dishes such as Thai green Quorn curry and cherry tomato and feta tart, and bakes his own bread – “the children love it”.

A lot of effort goes into planning nutritionally balanced, protein-filled meals that will genuinely appeal to children, says food buyer Lisa Haskell. “Mostly they’re not vegetarian at home so it has to be something they’d like to try. We use soya to make veggie balls in a lovely ragout sauce, or we’ll sometimes do veggie burgers and chips or pizza, as well as the spicier things. There’s a salad bar every day and I buy a huge amount of fruit.”

A table of sixth form girls are sanguine about meat-free meals. “People come to the school expecting that it’s vegetarian and just get on with it,” says Lauren Clark, 17, who chose the school partly because it matched her vegetarian diet. “You don’t have to be veggie to eat this,” adds Bella Crook, also 17. “You just don’t need three lots of meat a day.”



For Palmer, the school’s vegetarian policy has wider educational benefits. “It constantly raises the question ‘is what you do important and how does it affect the community and the planet?’. It symbolises care and responsibility for other living things.”

Children at St Chris enjoy a variety of vegetarian food. Photograph: David Leahy

It sounds perfect – except that not everyone wants to be forced to live in a veggie Eden. Last year, after an inspection report revealed student complaints about the food, St Chris introduced meat at evening meals for its small boarding community. “When we investigated, we found the kids didn’t think the food was bad but they thought the policy was illiberal,” says Palmer. “The boarders argued other kids could go home and have meat and they couldn’t.”

Palmer also discovered a “brilliant wheeze” whereby boarders would call the local Domino’s and order a “St Chris” – prompting the delivery of a pizza loaded with meat but covered with a deceptive layer of cheese.

The policy for boarders does not seem to be the start of a slippery slope, however. Students, who have a key role in running the school, threw out a plan to abandon the vegetarian tradition completely.

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With vegetarianism, or at least “less meat-ism”, growing in popularity for health and environmental reasons in the UK, will other schools follow St Chris and MUSE in giving children one meat-free meal a day?

In health terms, says Charlotte Stirling-Reed of SR Nutrition and member of the Nutrition Society, a vegan or vegetarian diet doesn’t have to be a problem for children, but it does take a lot of careful planning. “For a school to make this change, they would have to be very careful and ensure that they are planning a well-balanced meal each day that provides enough protein, iron, zinc and other essential vitamins and minerals to meet even the highest requirements for young children.”



It’s hard to see how a maintained school could go fully veggie given government regulations oblige them to provide red meat at least three times a week. “I think it would be hard for any school to impose strict rules for all children,” says Stirling-Reed. “Offering those who choose a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle plenty of options as well as practising sustainable methods of food procurement should go some way to reducing a school’s carbon footprint, while at the same time allowing choice, flexibility and acceptance for all.”



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