9-Year-Old Blogger Making Changes In School Lunches
Kids today. Don’t underestimate the power of our internet tools when wielded by the hands of children. A nine-year old Scottish girl has created quite a buzz with her blog, NeverSeconds.
Martha Payne, from Argyll, Scotland, began writing a blog earlier this month, rating and reviewing her school lunches as a writing project with her dad. The blog has since received more than one million page views and visitors from around the world including someone who knows quite a few things about school lunches, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.
Payne hasn’t loved all of her lunches; some may have included human hair, which is one of her rating criteria, along with how it tastes, whether or not its healthy, and just how many bites she ends up getting and for what price.
With the blog quickly gaining so much publicity, Payne’s father was invited to meet with the local school council, which resulted in giving kids unlimited amounts of fresh fruit, salad and bread. It also brought some “observers” into Payne’s lunchroom from the school council, which coincided with a boon to her lunch. She writes, “For the first time ever I have seen at lunch cherry tomatoes, radishes, carrot and cucumber shreddings.”
Payne’s blog is not the first to gain momentum and bring light to the issue of what’s being fed to children. The mysterious “Mrs. Q,” outed as Sarah Wu of Chicago, IL, gained popularity with her blog, Fed Up With Lunch, where as a school employee she bought the daily school lunch every day in 2010 and detailed its (lack of) nutritional quality, which outraged parents across the nation and eventually led to a book on the issue.
Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger
Image: NeverSeconds
