Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with fishsticks, chips, and peas. (It also doesn't meet the criteria for ultra-processed, if I correctly understand the term, so it's a bit off topic here). The chips are just potatoes and oil. The fishsticks are actual fish (cut into stick form while frozen) with breading. The peas are ...well, peas.
Some chips are re-hydrated mechanically digested potato flakes with a dozen different binders, preservatives, and stabilizers, and most budget fish sticks are half miscellaneous whitefish scrap and half breading made from stripped grain and a dozen different binders, preservatives, and stabilizers.
So mileage does vary a little on that.
And when I buy chips, the ingredients list lists exactly two things: potatoes and sunflower oil.
The fishsticks that I buy ("iglo", the procter & gamble brand, and I get the gluten-free ones) list a specific species of fish, then rice flour, chickpea flour, salt, corn flour, canola oil, water, potato starch, starches from peas. Plus MSC certification. That doesn't really sound objectionable to me.
There is a lot of "assuming the worst" going on in this thread and surrounding the topic of "processed foods" in general.
My concern is that turning our backs on industrial food processing is a luxury that many of us simply can't afford, either financially, or in terms of the practicalities of making our lives work.
There may be a lot of things that frequently happen in the processing of foods that lead to bad health outcomes, and the consumption of a diet rich in processed foods may strongly correlate with bad health outcomes, but saying "processed foods are bad for you" is doing a lousy job of identifying in a causative sense what exactly it is that's bad for you, and it's also a "luxury belief" in the sense that Rob Henderson has been talking about [1].
So now what?
The UK also has (or recently had, I no longer follow news from there) a significant poverty rate such that lunch was some school kids' first meal of the day, and free school meals was a significant political issue.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/01/number-of-uk...
The problem is that if kids don't eat lunch and go hungry that will negatively affect their ability to learn. As such offering less healthy food that they actually eat might very well be better than healthy food that they don't eat.
If the only meal is literal dog food, hungry kids will eat it direct from the container — a fact I know thanks to a real-life experience of an ex-girlfriend who was trying to be helpful and charitable but had a fit of middle-class naïveté after finding a puppy in a school in Kawangware.
They (probably) put more money into it and have the cultural attitudes to do all of the above.
Meal prices are quite competitive, kids usually eat at the canteen or at home, they don’t usually bring their own food
The food served at the canteens needs to be traceable, to avoid/mitigate food poisoning related issues. Once you start bringing external food into the system, you can no longer guarantee the safety of the other canteen goers, even if, theoretically, they will not be sharing their meals.
As an adult: it's bland by itself, needs sauce, or at least black pepper and olive oil.
Yup. I favour Mornay Sauce (a.k.a. cheese sauce). I have no idea why hating broccoli is a meme; broccoli-cheese with french fries is a nutritious and tasty meal.
You're right that it essentially boils down to the dietary preferences of the parents. If the parents are ok with such lunch as described in the article, there isn't much a regulation can do.