Customer review of Serving the Public by Kevin Morgan

Member and customer Arvind Sivaramakrishnan has enjoyed reading Serving the Public: the good food revolution in schools, hospitals and prisons by Kevin Morgan (published in January 2025) and had this to say about the book...

'This very clear, and academically impeccable, book roasts most British institutional food.  Badly fed – increasingly in the UK, underfed - children behave worse and learn less than their better-fed counterparts. Hospital inpatients’ recovery and staff performance are affected by poor food.  Prisoners who get poor-quality, unappetising, often cold, food – locked in cells for up to 22 hours a day, they sometimes eat sitting on their cell toilets – are more violent and reoffend more often than those who are fed better.

The dominant thinking amounts to punitive neoliberalism: children make food choices, hospitals choose the cheapest supplier, and prisoners deserve only humiliation.  The theory is false on immediate and long-term costs.  New schemes invariably show that locally sourced healthy food is cheaper than corporate-supplied food and gets public and business approval; on better school food, children themselves start diet-improvements at home.

Yet local campaigns are hard to sustain, and whole-institution or whole-system involvement needs political support (Scotland has free school meals for all pupils in Years 1-5, and for older pupils who meet set criteria).  Public pressure, however, could encourage politicians to resist Big Food.  Bon appétit.'

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