Wednesday, October 03, 2007

School Dinners

Healthy school meals have been only a partial success*, it seems. Even David calls Jamie Oliver for doing away with tasty food and flavoured drinks at his school, even sugar free ones.

When I went to Kenton school, there was a meal choice which you decided by picking which dining hall to go into. (We had a choice of two, there were five in total with three kitchens, after all there were 1,500 kids to feed). The daily dish was chalked up on a blackboard in the corridor. One day, a new word appeared- Macedoine. It turns out this meant diced veg (generally carrots & suede or turnip) but we didn't know how to pronounce it- instead of May-say-dwan we said Mack-ee-doyne.

I now see that it originated in Macedonia, hence the name. Ahh, isn't the internet wonderful?

*Partial success- euthemism for an almost but not quite total failure where something minor went right in amongst the train wreck. As used on an Army Telecoms project I worked on in the mid-90s.

3 comments:

lady macleod said...

tucking this bit of knowledge away for that awkward lull in the conversation...

Shades said...

Glad to be of service, Lady M. Don't blame me if it backfires though. They may tell you Macedoine can be fruit based as well.

James Higham said...

School dinners have definitely moved on.