Intentionally reducing portions and quality of ingredients is simple a classic of catering theft that thrives in school canteens. Photo: RIA Novosti
At the end of the year, all sorts of officials looked into school plates: the president, people from the All-Russian Popular Front (ONF), representatives of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, and governors.
The ONF checked school meals and found seven ways manufacturers and suppliers steal from children's plates. These are
- and fraud with electronic veterinary certification, allowing the use of counterfeit,
- and changing the expiration date of products, their grade,
- and doubling veterinary supporting documents to sell illegal products,
- and inflating class attendance.
Among all this fraudulent variety, in the first place is a simple deliberate reduction of portions< /strong>: this is just a classic catering theft, reliably providing a stream of income for the gilding of toilet bowls and the artsy real estate of its organizers. All you need is: do not put butter in porridge or boil soup on water instead of broth. You can also draw fake menus in order to replace ingredients with cheaper ones. The country learned the formula of this method not so long ago from the mouth of the ex-deputy of Rostov, Vitaly Latyshev:
“You must always write on the menu — cutlets, but this does not mean that they need to be given.”
People's Front to fight crime in school canteens connected several more «fronts»: the Ministry of Education, Rospotrebnadzor, Rosselkhoznadzor and the prosecutor's office. The Bureau of Investigation of the ONF is preparing a «Grey Book» of school meals — about ways of illegal enrichment in the supply of products and services. I have no doubt that there will be a book, and monitoring will continue, and many forums on this topic will be held — like cutlets, it's all paid for.
But it's not a fact that serious changes will occur in the school plate. Because it is easy to describe in the White Paper the official ways to lighten this plate of school food. As I already told in Novaya, it is the inefficient economy and the archaic organization of Russian school meals that literally halve school breakfasts and lunches.