Source: Radio New Zealand
Associate Education Minister David Seymour. RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
A Christchurch school caused a big drama by talking to the media about mouldy school lunches before waiting for investigation findings, David Seymour says.
Haeata Community Campus has been at odds with New Zealand Food Safety and school lunch provider Compass Group about how the mince and potato meals came to be served to children on 1 December.
NZ Food Safety investigators concluded the most plausible explanation was a mix-up at the school and there were no food safety risks associated with the School Lunch Collective supplier Compass Group.
The rotten food served to students at Haeata Community Campus. Supplied / Haeata Community Campus
Associate Education Minister David Seymour said it was unfortunate the food safety watchdog first heard about the problem from the media rather than the school.
“I just wish this hadn’t been necessary. If everyone had just kept a cool head and no-one had run off to the media and they’d gone through the proper process putting child safety number one and child education number two, then this report would have been issued and and no one would have heard much about it,” he said.
“This shouldn’t have been made a major drama and a beat-up.”
New Zealand Food Safety made a number of recommendations following the investigation, saying improvements to tracing and reporting processes would reduce the risk of a repeat.
Overall, Seymour said the the school lunches programme was a “triumph”.
“We’ve had, what is it, two weeks now of talking about 20 lunches when there wasn’t actually an issue,” he said.
“I acknowledge that there were serious challenges in term one because a subcontractor basically went bankrupt and stopped supplying the lunches. That was a real crisis but we actually fixed it really quickly and we haven’t had any problems since then,” he said.
“The healthy school lunches programme is almost half the cost of Labour’s programme and the number of meals that get rejected or sent back every day is the same as Labour’s programme. So I would say half the cost, same quality.”
Haeata Community Campus principal Peggy Burrows said the school would review NZ Food Safety’s report alongside its own internal investigation.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
