At first, it is hard to believe your eyes. It's lunchtime on the first day of the spring term at St Peter's Church of England Primary School in East Bridgford, Nottinghamshire, and the children are heaping their plates with salad. Yes, salad. And broccoli. And carrots and peas. And no one's forcing them. They genuinely seem to like their vegetables - and the home-produced shepherd's pie and locally made sausages that are also on the menu that day. 'It's all really nice and nutritious,' says Helena, aged 10. A world away, then, from what one food watchdog recently called the 'low-grade, artery-clogging swill' that most schoolchildren find on their plates each lunchtime.

Nothing served at St Peter's is processed or pre-prepared, says catering manager Jeanette Orrey, perched on a swivel chair in her 'office' (a desk and a phone squeezed into a corner of her immaculate school kitchen). 'And I can tell you exactly where every ingredient comes from. The lamb is from a farm two miles away. It's slaughtered 10 miles from there and then transported here directly. The sausages are made at the same farm as the lamb. The potatoes are local, from Nottinghamshire; the carrots are from Lincolnshire. The eggs and milk are from a dairy 13 miles down the road. The flour and sugar are organic. Thirty per cent of our food is organic and I'm working to get that figure higher.'

At a time when survey after survey shows that children's diets are getting worse and that cancer-causing childhood obesity is increasing at an exponential rate, Jeanette's emphasis on healthy, wholesome, traceable ingredients is clearly very different from the norm. Most four to 18-year-olds were found by recent government research to consume dangerously unhealthy amounts of salty, fatty, sugary, processed foods and their school lunches do little to counteract this trend. But Jeanette, 47, is fanatical about providing the children at St Peter's with a good, balanced diet. 'Most kids don't eat anything like the recommended five portions of fruit and veg a day,' she says. 'But ours are given at least three vegetables and a piece of fruit each lunchtime and they love it.'

The secret, says Jeanette, is simple: make it taste good. And fresh, local produce, preferably organic, freshly and properly cooked tastes better than anything imported, processed and pre-prepared, she argues. Making it look good helps, too. In St Peter's dining hall great bowls of gorgeous, shiny red, chunky-cut tomatoes, gleaming cucumbers, yoghurt-dressed coleslaw and bright carrot salad are set out invitingly on a long counter next to the shepherd's pie, sausages, mash and cooked veg, all of which looks and smells delicious. The tables are smartly laid with blue-and-white checked tablecloths and big jugs of water. Harry, nine, was piling carrots and broccoli onto his plate the day I was there. 'They're all right, you know. Really, you should try them,' he urged. 'Not soggy, like normal vegetables.' ('It's all in the timing,' says Jeanette, 'We cook them for no more than five minutes.')

It wasn't always like this at St Peter's. Until three years ago, the food was bought in from a big contract supplier. 'We used to get these pre-prepared vegetables arriving every morning, potatoes already peeled and packaged in plastic in this white, slimy, chemical preservative sludge,' recalls Jeanette. 'It was depressing.' She and her colleagues began to feel 'completely demotivated and deskilled'. The most challenging thing Jeanette had to do all day was 'use a pair of scissors to open a packet of sponge mix, tip the water in and that was it. Job done'. Because of the minimal preparation and real cooking required of them, their hours and salaries were being cut.

Then, like local education authorities up and down the country, Nottinghamshire deregulated its school lunch services and Jeanette, who had been at the school for 10 years, jumped at the chance to take control of what came into and went out of her own kitchen. She approached head teacher David Maddison with the idea of taking school meals back in-house and buying fresh meat and vegetables directly from local farmers, using as much organic produce as possible. Almost immediately, it became clear that, as a purchaser of food for 1,000 meals a week, 38 weeks a year, Jeanette had considerable buying muscle. As a result of this, and of her minimal overheads - there are no catering company executives and secretaries to pay - she has kept costs down while dramatically improving quality. The price the children pay for a school meal at St Peter's is £1.70, the same as at any other school in Nottinghamshire. Yet Jeanette spends 70 pence a head on ingredients, which is twice the national average.

Not surprisingly, with appealing dishes on the menu such as pasta and bacon in organic cheese sauce, homemade chicken and ham pie, savoury mince with peppers, regular roasts and even 'provençal lamb', the take-up of lunches at St Peter's has increased to a whopping 85 per cent, compared with a national average of 45 per cent. However, there is no pressure on the children to buy into the new regime. They are given menus to take home each week, so they can bring a packed lunch if there is nothing they like on offer on any particular day. Parents are welcome to come in and eat with their kids whenever they like - and they do. Last Christmas, Jeanette served 275 Christmas lunches - in a school with under 200 pupils.

'It's more hard work now but it's so much more rewarding,' Jeanette says. 'My ladies are all better off because I have been able to increase their pay and give them longer hours and they like the extra responsibility. We've got a very low staff turnover now. No one wants to leave.'

Although she still cooks at St Peter's three days a week, Jeanette now works for the Soil Association on the other two days, having won its Local Food Initiative of the Year award for 2003. With Lizzie Vann of the Organix baby food brand - who is governor of a Devon school which also does its own catering - Jeanette initiated the Soil Association's recent Food For Life report, which spearheaded its campaign for local and organic school meals and better food education. She also spends a lot of her time now speaking at food conferences around the country. A few days after we met, she was due to appear on BBC television, discussing healthy eating for children with David Dimbleby.

'I do get a lot of requests,' she says, 'and I've got used to speaking in public but it used to scare me to death. When I went down to pick up my Soil Association award at the Dorchester hotel it was the first time I had ever been to London in my life and I was terrified. I got through my acceptance speech because I was confident enough in my belief in getting good food into children. It's not rocket science, really, it's just common sense.'

Jeanette learnt to cook through being the wife of a miner and mother of 'three strapping lads' now in their late teens and early twenties, two of whom still live at home. 'I give them the kind of food we cook at school: shepherd's pies, roasts - there's a beef casserole on the hob at the moment.' She has no particular culinary hero or heroine, rather she cherry picks ideas and inspiration from a range of chefs such as Raymond Blanc, Gary Rhodes and Jamie Oliver.

'I took a workshop not long ago for the Soil Association and Raymond Blanc was in my group, which was a bit daunting,' she recalls. 'But afterwards he said he had really enjoyed it and invited me to lunch at the Manoir aux Quat' Saisons.' Jeanette chortles with laughter at the very idea. She turned him down for a meeting with Nottinghamshire county council. 'First and foremost, I'm a dinner lady,' she says. 'I'm not, nor do I ever want to be a celebrity chef. I'm much more comfortable in my overalls, hands on in the kitchen. It's where I belong.'

foodforlifeuk.org
soilassociation.org