It is a year now since ministers promised to transform school food. The wave of parental anger that broke after Jamie Oliver's television series still runs deep, but the film crews and celebrities have moved on. The original dinner lady is still out there, though, battling to turn back the tide. Jeanette Orrey has always been in it for the long haul.
Orrey is the cook from a small primary school in Nottinghamshire who threw out the big private caterers with their instant mash and moulded meat and brought in real, local food. She not only inspired and helped Jamie Oliver behind the scenes but, long before his series, laid the groundwork with the Soil Association for better school food, so that when Oliver's charismatic intervention pushed the government to act, it had something to build on. Orry's first book, The Dinner Lady, was an instant bestseller, and her latest book, Second Helpings, full of practical advice and recipes for both parents and school cooks, has just been published.
The day we meet, Orry is in the thick of it on Ashlyns organic farm in Essex, with the snow falling on the rolling claylands outside. Ashlyns is where she has set up the country's first school for dinner ladies, with the help of a grant from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and in collaboration with the farm's owner, Jim Collins.
She commutes here three days a week to help school cooks improve their skills. She has finally given up her old job in the kitchen at St Peter's primary school because the rest of her time is spent driving to talks in her role as Soil Association school meals policy adviser. "Thank God for sat nav. My car's new and I've already done 38,000 miles."
Ashlyns training school was officially opened last autumn by Oliver and Orrey is generous in her praise for what the naked chef has achieved. She herself would never have done as a Jamie dinner lady. She may be a TV casting director's gift - a big presence, with a northerner's no-nonsense directness and humour - but Jamie's School Dinners required someone who couldn't cook or cope, as a foil for the celebrity chef's metamorphosing power. Orrey has always been able to cope; she is a doer. Before Oliver was even interested in the issue, she had worked out how to transform her own school food, not with the melodrama of brilliant TV, but with the slow, steady, common sense of a mother of three grown-up boys with more than 14 years' experience in the school kitchen.
In 2000, fed up with her cooking role "being reduced to opening packets with a pair of scissors", she established her own network of farmers and producers to supply her direct with fruit, vegetables, meat and milk. She reintroduced cookery lessons to the school curriculum. She changed the menus and civilised the dining room. She was even feeding the village OAPs in the school dining hall at the same time. But she did it gradually, so that the children's tastes had time to adapt. "We're cooks, not chefs. You can't change things overnight. You've got to keep the children with you. We've taken five years at my school, St Peter's."
Her fear is still that everyone wants school food improved too quickly. "We've lost two generations who don't know how to cook. It will be too abrupt for the children. Then numbers [taking school meals] will go down and who will sustain the service? It'll be the dinner ladies in the firing line. Everyone has to get behind these ladies," she insists.
The two-day course at Ashlyns seeks to acheive this goal, with more than 300 recruits having already passed through and returned to their schools to improve what they serve to pupils."The ladies who come are nervous; they think they are going to be patronised. They feel dumped on. They've been given all this fresh food, but no equipment, no training and no one's paying for their extra hours. In some areas, some are even talking about going on strike," Orrey says. "They go away with some confidence and new ideas."
Orrey has ambitious plans for similar training schools; ideally, one in each region. There have also been visits to Downing Street and Highgrove, and more awards than her mantelpiece has room for. But the biggest compliment for her is when the dinner ladies tell her, as one group did last week, that she's still one of them. "We were having a fag break outside, and they said, 'You're still a dinner lady'. That's the best I can hear. My life has changed beyond recognition but if it all ends tomorrow, I've had a bloody good time and I hope I could still get a job in a school again."
Orrey's modesty belies a formidable vision. At Ashlyns they are not only training a new generation of school staff, but also creating a new business model for public catering. Instead of the hugely long global distribution chains that large catering contractors depend on, they have re-established direct links between the land and local people. Schools can buy fresh, seasonal produce from a few miles away, while their children visit the farm to see how their food is grown. The local rural economy is being revived. A cooperative of 15 farms supplies organic fruit and vegetables and meat to Ashlyns, which then distributes it to 25 schools, as well as care homes, and through a box scheme to the general public. The middle men with their added-value margins and nutrition-depleting processing have been cut out.
When I visit, the women in the Ashlyn's kitchen have been learning new recipes and menu planning. The results are laid out on the steel counters for assessment by Simon Owen, the trainee chef Oliver used in Greenwich, who now works with Orrey. This is the sort of school food parents dream of their children eating - salmon fish fingers made from scratch, homemade organic chicken nuggets, organic beef lasagne, sweet potato and lentil korma with brown rice, fresh steamed and roasted vegetables. Owen gives the dinner ladies tips on how to make sure the children actually do eat it. Garnish with whole pieces of parsley and lemon - they like colour, but then you can take them off if the children fuss. Don't give them a choice, put a whole meal on their plate even if they don't eat it at first ...
Means of overcoming other problems are discussed too. Several of the women know of schools where the kitchens have fallen into deficit since the Oliver series because children stopped eating school dinners in sufficient numbers to cover overheads. Some women have already made changes to their menus but are struggling to get the children to eat the food and feel they are not getting support from teachers and parents. Some still work for private contractors and are worried about giving their names.
Orrey is now also on the board of the School Food Trust, the body set up by the education secretary, Ruth Kelly, to oversee new standards after the Oliver series. Several of the multinational companies Oliver criticised for feeding children junk are also represented on the board. Does she think large catering companies can effect the sort of transformation she has? She hestitates briefly. "I think all the people who went on the trust did it because they actually care. But no, they can't do it because they have to look to their shareholders. We aren't doing this for the money."
Her visit to Ashlyns this time is a flying one, squeezed in between a weekend back home catching up with her husband of 32 years, George, and a glamorous dinner in London to launch her new book. She may still be a dinner lady but she is also a celebrity in her own right. By the end of the launch evening, the publishing chatter has moved from school dinners to general gossip. Although Orrey can gossip with the best, she can't stop herself pulling the table back to the important matter in hand with a tale that is both funny and passionate. "I was at this school recently, sat next to a young lad, and he was having roast dinner and he wolfed the lot. And I could see him looking at me sideways and eyeing up the roast potato on my plate, so I said, 'Do you want some more?' And he looked at me and just nodded. So I got him some more. And he wolfed that. Then he was looking at my roast potato again and I said, 'Do you want that?' and he just nodded, so I gave it to him. And I looked at the head, and I could see she was thinking, I know what you're thinking, yes, there's a lot of it about. Food poverty. People just don't realise how much food poverty there is out there."
For Orrey, that's why the dinner ladies are so important.
· Second Helpings From the Dinner Lady is published by Bantam Press, priced £18.99. The Soil Association's Food for Life school food programme is available at Foodforlife
