Dear Mr Seymour,
Having a centralised lunch programme for schools might seem like an attractive cost saving option to you, but I can tell you from programmes I have filmed in Sweden, Finland, and Porirua that empowering each school with a set amount of allocated funds to provide sit down lunches for their tamariki is a much cleverer option that I urge you to consider.
Why? Because schools can not only provide culturally appropriate food prepared by local people who understand and interact with the children. A school organised menu can also cater for kids with allergies.
There are huge social benefits in a sit down lunch programme for the school. If you watch the Porirua School in this clip for example you will see children learning social skills that improves their behaviour – older children learning to serve food hygienically and helping the younger ones. ( Rather than bullying them).
But don’t listen to me. I have supplied this clip from my documentary Inside Child Poverty Revisited so you can listen to the teachers talk about how everyone sitting down at lunch time produces a positive family atmosphere in a school and helps defuse behavioural issues as well as imorove educational outcomes.
This clip will also give you some of historical background to the school lunch issue in our country.
The whole documentary is available on THREE NOW or you can watch it here at the New York Festival Site where it won a Silver Award.
Bryan Bruce is one of New Zealand’s most important and respected documentary makers. His work is available on bryanbruce.substack.com



Seymour now thinks food is woke. Anything to create a divisive angle. He is such a smarmy, smug, little tosser.
…. or as someone, apologetically but truthfully, once said of Seymour, he’s an “arrogant prick”.
Not to mention that involving the community in school lunches means you have a good chance of getting good, committed, free labour from locals. It really says something about Seymour that he considers being able to redirect money for this to some multinational theft corporation like G4S as more important than delivering value for money.
That’s exactly what he’s up to.
Cheaper is preprepared, processed and packaged, stamped with best before. Its not really food but it makes someone money.
Exactly and unappetising as all hell.
Remember the hospital food debacle ?
Even the Canterbury hospital board rebuilt their own HUGE COMMERCIAL kitchen and brought it back inhouse at Burwood hospital for all CDHB hospitals.
School lunch waste will go through the roof.
The crap they intend to feed them I hated when I was schooling in the 1960s.
Actually the only thing ” woke” in all of this is Simple Seymour himself.
LOL! ..says it all…
They’ve also solved the housing crisis… build a mega prison.
Yes, Bob and they have also solved the beneficiary crisis….. build a mega prison they are killing two birds with one stone.
We have an expression where I live. Perhaps you know it. “Pissing into the wind.” Seymour is a libertarian, libertarians are almost by definition as ignorant as fuck. They have been a number of experiments with libertarians running local governments in various places – they have all ended in tears. But it doesn’t matter, because Seymour is immune to evidence.
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