Smartcards used to track kids' school dinners

Did little Daniel or Danielle have chips or salad for their school lunch? And would they tell you the truth if you asked? The Institute of Food Research is trying to get round schoolkids' forked tongues by using smartcards to discover their true eating habits.

The Institute carried out a trial of the scheme at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in North London to "test the viability of using smartcard technology to monitor pupils' mealtime choices".

The year-long pilot recorded the precise choices made by more than 1,000 seven- to 16-year-olds using the system to buy their school meals. The nutritional content of the foods was then analysed electronically - an analysis which has produced the shock finding that children prefer foods high in fat and sugar, despite celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's recent drive to clean up school dinners.

According to the Institute of Food Research, one in five secondary school canteens already use smartcards for the payment of school meals. The study found that smartcard food-tracking technology would go down a treat in university, army and prison canteens where analysing which diners are on top-form and which are scurvy-in-waiting would be "beneficial".

However, the Institute spotted a potential flaw in its Utopian tucker-tracking dream: pupils and parents might have privacy objections to the future contents of kids' alimentary canals going under the microscope.

Senior nutritionist on the study, Professor Ian Johnson, said: "The research using smartcard technology has demonstrated the ability of the system to identify individuals who persistently choose highly inappropriate meals. What a school does with that important health information presents society with an ethical issue."