On one of the last Daily Politics of last "season" they had Ken Clarke and a couple of others talking about school dinners. The whole issue is back on the menu this week as we hear of parents delivering non-school dinners to their children in schools to get round the supposedly more healthy food on offer inside.

The thing that struck me about Ken Clarke's argument was that he said "we must allow choice" in school dinners. That it would be wrong to impose a healthy diet essentially to the exclusionon of other less healthy choices that the kids voted for with their taste-buds.

Well, I cannot remember ever having a choice at school (and I had three meals a day there until I was eighteen). And I'm pretty damned sure that Ken Clarke's grammar school twenty and more years before mine would not have offered a choice. I am sure we had one dish, or a plated salad if ordered, or a specific and usually unappetising looking thing if you had a registered special dietary requirement (and in all that time I don't remember one person being adversely affected by the seeming plethora of allergies we hear of nowadays).

I realise that nowadays there are more kids allowed to decide for themselves not to eat meat and so on, and sure, they should be catered for. But what's the problem with one vegetarian and one meat based choice and that's it? Since when did eight year olds understand what was good for them enough to be offered some range of different foods every day?