There are regulations on the nutrient composition of school meals to ensure that the menus help children build a healthy diet. Now, some children who choose to take a packed lunch to school, have certain items removed from it by the school, e.g. a chocolate bar. The chocolate bar is then returned to the child at the end of the day.

This practice is absolutely dreadful. Items that anyone has in their packed lunch on one day are irrelevant. It depends how often they have a particular item, what else they take in their packed lunch and their dietary intake outside school. Schools should work with children and parents, to guide them about better food choices for their packed lunch, rather than remove items from it. If a foodstuff is confiscated from a child’s lunch, they may return to class still hungry and not perform as well during the afternoon session as they would have done if they had been permitted to eat their lunch.

Since my previous Blog, on-line grocery shopping has much improved. Log-in and check-out are both much faster, making the experience of grocery shopping on-line much better. In addition, you can view the nutition information, front-of-pack nutrition panels, ingredients lists and the price for most products, before deciding which ones you want to purchase.  In 2009, it really is much faster to shop for groceries on line.  Whatever you want to buy, you can probably buy it on-line and any delivery charge will be much less than driving to the store and back. So, what are you waiting for – now you really can do all your shopping on-line!

Four years ago, shopping on-line was fantastic, very easy, great fun and saving a lot of time. For groceries, this is no longer the case. Now, it’s so slow  one can travel 30 miles to the supermarket, buy a week’s groceries and be back home in less time than it would have taken to do the shopping on-line!

One can buy all sorts of things on-line, but only the groceries are slow. Logging on to the store takes ages, as does checking out.  It is not clear why this should be the case. Certain shopping times are likely to be busier than others, but the supermarket should be able to deal with this. They should ensure that those employed to manage their website have adequate IT skills for this task.

If a lot of people want to shop at the same time, the Companies’ website should be able to channel the log-in requests through additional servers. It should not be necessary for everyone to come in through the same gateway. After all, when you go to the store, if there are long queues at the checkout, the supermarket opens more checkouts, if available.  At many stores, there is also the option of using an automated checkout, which can be faster. Nevertheless, there are still sometimes long queues in stores. On-line shopping ought to relieve the congestion in stores, not simply relocate the congestion from stores to computers.

It has recently been stated that there is now so much traffic on the Internet that the web may come to a grinding halt within the next few years.  So, perhaps at that point, we’ll all be back to going to the supermarket and queuing at checkouts as before. In the meantime, supermarkets whose IT staff cannot manage their web traffic will lose business to other supermarkets who can.  Those of us who don’t have a choice of supermakets who will deliver to our location, will have to shop on-line at about 2am!

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