Can pre made dishes enter the campus? Additives | Preservatives | Entering Campus
Since the start of the new semester, "pre made dishes on campus" has been a hot topic and controversial. In some videos circulating on social media, a stall in a university cafeteria sells a cooking bag to students by scalding it with hot water. Some elementary school students are suspected of collectively consuming pre made dishes, resulting in a large amount of leftover food due to being "not tasty". Some industry insiders also claim that after the start of the school year, the daily shipment volume of the warehouse has skyrocketed from seven or eight tons to over 120 tons, and pre made vegetables stored for a long time have also been cleared from the warehouse.
These widely circulated videos and information have not yet been fully verified and confirmed, but an undeniable fact is that the topic of "pre made meals on campus" has caused concern and anxiety among many parents. In the online space, opposition from parents can be seen everywhere. In offline real life, some schools gather a large number of parents to deliver meals to their children at every meal point, in order to avoid them going to the cafeteria to eat pre made dishes.
Prefabricated dishes on campus are related to the physical health and physical and mental development of students, especially young children, and this is also an important concern for parents of students. Their primary concern is whether pre made dishes can fully meet the nutritional needs of students? Prefabricated dishes often have a longer inventory time due to "pre production", and generally suffer from issues such as nutrient loss. For the convenience of storage and other considerations, pre made dishes also rarely use ingredients such as fresh leafy vegetables. Even if fresh vegetable ingredients are used, the vitamins and other components in them are easily damaged due to long-term storage. Students, especially primary and secondary school students, are in a critical stage of growing their bodies. Can the ingredients, production techniques, and consumption process of prefabricated dishes ensure a comprehensive and sufficient nutritional supply?
Secondly, pre made dishes also heavily use ingredients such as additives and preservatives. The long list of additives, preservatives, and other ingredients in pre made dishes has become a controversial focus in the pictures posted by some parents on social media. In addition, in order to maintain the appearance of food, pre made dishes often require heavy salt and oil. On the one hand, these ingredients affect the taste of food, causing some students to experience loss of appetite, anorexia, and abandonment. On the other hand, if students consume these substances in large quantities for a long time, it may also be detrimental to their physical health.
Once again, there is currently no unified mandatory production and processing standard in the pre made food industry, mostly local or group standards. The lack of standards also raises doubts among students and parents. Due to varying entry barriers for operators and varying product quality standards, there is still a phenomenon of mixed good and bad in the prefabricated food industry. After pre made dishes are introduced to the market, a mechanism of survival of the fittest can be gradually formed through fierce market competition. However, when they enter schools, in a closed or semi closed campus environment, in a monopolistic or semi monopolistic student cafeteria, the mechanism of market competition and survival of the fittest may fail, and even due to various non market factors, the consequence of "bad currency driving out good currency" may be formed, causing some suppliers with incomplete qualifications and low-quality products to occupy the dining table of student cafeterias for a long time.
In addition, the regulatory mechanism of student canteens also makes many students and parents feel uneasy. At present, many student canteens adopt a contracted operation model for operation and management, and there is even a phenomenon of layer by layer subcontracting. That is, after a single enterprise contracts the student canteen as a whole, it then subcontracts different floors and stalls to different enterprises and individual businesses for specific operations. In this business model, regulatory deficiencies, opaque information, and even rent-seeking power often occur. These loopholes in management mechanisms objectively leave opportunities for inferior pre made dishes to take advantage of.
Despite being at the forefront of the market and rapidly expanding the industry, prefabricated dishes are still a new phenomenon overall. There is still a lack of sufficient empirical materials and authoritative research on the impact of long-term and large-scale consumption of pre made vegetables on physical health. In the situation where the conditions are not yet mature and the relevant management mechanisms need to be improved, the health risks inherent in "pre made dishes entering the campus" cannot be underestimated.
Therefore, before the concerns and doubts of students and parents are fully answered, student canteens should not rashly open their doors to pre made dishes. In fact, amidst the controversy in public opinion, many regulatory departments and school leaders in recent days have made it clear that student canteens are not considering introducing pre made dishes at this stage. Adhering to the principle of prudence in the face of controversial new things, prioritizing the physical health and physical and mental development of students, widely listening to opinions from all parties, fully respecting and protecting the right to information, choice, and supervision of students and parents, should become a conscious responsibility of more schools and regulatory departments.
