School dinners

So we have a week of assessments coming up and first up is a politics radio package. Mine is on the lack of cooking in schools and how this needs to change…

At first I was going to look at voter confidence within ethnic minorities and base it in Bristol. I got in touch with Ujima radio, who I’ve worked with before and focus on history and heritage. They’re looking at voting within young and ethnic groups and it all sounded really positive…except they’ve not got any figures yet and are in the first stages of investigating. Following a session with my tutor Charlotte where we looked at schools, I realised cooking with children could do with some focus…

Change of plan

I heard Penair school in Truro served amazing meals and rang them up. The chef serves regular dishes like cottage pie, but also adventurous ones like braised python, battered frogs legs and snails! I spoke to the head chef Dan and interviewed him, but as I was filming (for a showreel) I used a camera microphone. The levels for all the vox pops I did with the kids were fine, but when I got home I could hardly hear Dan – so I had to go back and interview him again with my M-audio.

I arranged an interview with Neil Burden too – who works at Cornwall Council in charge of children’s services. I rang and emailed numerous other people from cooking schemes in Cornwall, but they all seemed to have stopped! This enforced my package’s point that not enough is done to educate children about cooking, and not just in Cornwall, but all over the UK.

I then found out that in February, the government decided this September, cooking lessons for children will be compulsory.  So although this hasn’t yet come into action, it will in September – and will be an excellent way of moving the story on!

I’m really glad I used children’s thoughts on their school meals at Penair, as they were my ideal targets for vox pops. I had planned to go to Penair for one of the cookery clubs Dan runs, but it was cancelled. The next one was the day after my assessment hand-in. It would have been great to get such good audio from that and speak to children and watch Dan carve up carcasses! But I suppose the story is that not enough is done to get children into cooking, so I focused on that and thought of Penair as one of the exceptions.

My target audience is BBC Radio Cornwall, as it’s a local story about an important issue – and I used Cornish people. I also think this could be easily transferred to a national audience if I interviewed a few people around the country and compared what they did.

SFX

Getting appropriate sounds for the package was a little tricky. I thought immediately cooking sounds! I had wildtrack of the canteen which created atmosphere, yet when I went to record me cooking, my M-audio just would not work. Turns out it had reset itself to record for a bigger jack cable than usual. But I powered on and recorded sizzling, chopping, banging of jars, cutlery, dinner ladies – and hopefully it helps create a sense of place. I thought of adding music, but food-related music is hard to come by. ‘Food, glorious food’ from Oliver is, according to Tim Hubbard, far too obvious. I listened to Radio 4 and cooking programmes to gauge what they used, but it was mostly SFX of cooking. I used cooking sounds as a bed under the whole package, as it’s more realistic than just my voice. I tried to match the sounds with what was being said too – so when Neil says ‘it’s better for them than a microwave meal,’ I have the hum of a microwave underneath and when he stops speaking, it dings!