“Boys and girls do not turn off at 13:00 and turn on at 15:00 hours, they are also educating in that period of the dining hours and learn to eat,” says the head of the Zamakola school dining room in Bilbao, Irati Lucas, in the podcast. In fact, for the children and adolescents who eat, the monitors have the same role as educator as any tutor, “and since you are an educator you need a training, but today the canteens' monitors of public centers do not have that role, and according to their agreement they are ‘bijilantes’,” explains Nerea Olaziregi, head of the Altzaga de Erandio school dining room.

In this sense, he has appointed an interesting project that they want to start this course in their school, with the objective of creating an educational dining room: during the dining hours, a “powerful training” will be given to the monitors who are ‘vigilantes’ in that space where the children play in the patio, to transmit the philosophy of the center and that this philosophy will also splash the space of the dining room.

We asked a worker who has worked as a monitor at a school for the company Ausolan and told us that he has received an on-line course (how to deal with allergies, what to do in case of an emergency…) and that they have the quantity of food defined, according to age. From there, a little bit more or less. If the school dining room is really a place to educate in food, do the monitors get any criteria about what, how much, how to eat? “There’s no set criteria, older peers told me, for example, if it’s the same student who doesn’t eat every day, so he’ll have a bit of food, and things like that, but a lot of food is thrown in the dining room.”

Let us think that children and young people can also have monitors that do not know Euskera in the school canteen, as they are companies subcontracted by the Basque Government, and “in the conditions that define the profile of these workers there is no minimum level of Euskera, nor a minimum level of training, anyone can come to work in our canteens”. Irati Lucas explained that in her school, for example, they have in the dining room a female worker who does not know Euskera. In the school of Nerea Olaziregi have also had someone who does not know Euskera: “In addition, the workers do not have a previous interview with the company that has hired them, nor do they look at their level or know Euskera.”

The two school canteens responsible have explained that they have not received any training in this specific work either. It is your responsibility, according to the law, to organize food services, to keep track of menus, to follow sustainability criteria, to promote good practices… “and more”. With regard to these food-related responsibilities, Olaziregi says that they have very limited intervention, interacting between the Basque Government and the private enterprise subcontracted by the Basque Government for the provision of the service: “If the food they bring is rotten, if the quantities are not adequate… we can intervene, but we cannot influence the origin of the products, the structuring of the menu…”. According to Lucas, “the regulations leave very little autonomy to the responsible and the cooks, because we cannot get out of the recipe that is established, we cannot demand products from our environment, we cannot decide on the menu…”.

Olaziregi would change the model from top to bottom, “because it is an important space that offers great opportunities outside the classroom, although it tends to be largely out of the educational project. I feel very lonely, and as far as possible I look for slots, interweaving with other agents, etc., on the road of another dining model. Canteens cannot be business, and from the moment we leave them in the hands of a company, it is so.” In Lucas’ words, “there are dining rooms in which children often do not want to eat, it cannot be that a child says that they do not like fish because of their experience in the dining room, the food in the dining room has to be of good quality, warm, appetizing… and that does not happen”.

They have also claimed in the podcast dining committees that serve to bring together the educational community and influence the dining rooms. In the school of Olaziregi there is no dining committee, “in that we are”. In Lucas, in addition to the families, the management team and the person in charge of the dining room, the commission is also made up of staff from the dining room, who decided to invite them to participate in it. “We met about every two months, and as last year we changed the company, the meetings were quite informative, but there has to be a space to collect concerns and problems, analyze them and develop a plan.”