Government-owned, contractor-operated
There are currently more than 400 GOCO elementary and middle-school kitchens serving nutritious meals. Although that is only 11% of Taiwan's 3400 schools, their influence should not be underestimated. Two focal points in the school lunch debate are that certain locations are hotly contested among caterers, and that in some cases a single central kitchen serves meals to as many as 5-6000 children.
"Unless a business stands to make an annual profit of hundreds of thousands or several million, why would it bother to bid for a government contract?" Yen Mei-chuan, president of the Homemakers' Union and Foundation, says it is understandable under these circumstances if firms try to increase their profits by cutting spending on ingredients and staff. The problem is that while from the government's standpoint outsourcing school kitchen operations is certainly convenient, if students' interests were put first, would it not make sense to spend a few hundred thousand NT dollars on improving lunch menus?
Moreover, although GOCO kitchens are statutorily required to hire a nutritionist, the nutritionist's boss is the contractor, which makes proper monitoring rather difficult. If the School Health Act is put into practice, over 300 nutritionists will be working in schools islandwide in the next few years. That ought to reverse a deplorable trend. But if GOCO kitchens become the norm, government-hired nutritionists will occupy a very challenging position between caterers and schools.
In Taipei, where most school kitchens are government-owned/contractor-operated, one newly appointed government nutritionist found that for several years the school's lunch contractor had been flavoring its meals with a chemical seasoning known as dagujing ("big bone extract"). The nutritionist asked the contractor to stop using the seasoning because of its harmful health effects, but the school failed to back her up. In another case, the nutritionist found substandard ingredients and asked for the food to be recalled, but kept meeting with indirect refusals from company executives who felt secure in the knowledge that they had the backing of school and government officials. What is a lowly nutritionist to do?
Parents see school-owned and operated kitchens as the ideal, but local conditions and resources vary and there are some obstacles.
Many big central kitchens originally designed to supply nearby schools experience problems delivering large quantities of meals, managing their personnel, and maintaining their equipment and boilers. Schools often worry that "a boiler is like a time bomb waiting to go off in the school." The traffic and transportation problems involved in delivering meals to several schools are also more than overstretched school staff can cope with.