Individualizing Children's Diets and Food Allergy

As in many countries, Australia has a program of school canteens providing food to students. The program began in the early part of the 20th century and traditionally had two important components: first, to ensure that all students had access to food during the school hours; second, to provide for children an opportunity to eat and enjoy food together. Recently, school canteen have come under scrutiny because of the quality of food being sold. Foods high in fat, sugar, salt and other ingredients deemed "unhealthy" were shown to be the mainstay of school canteens (Sanigorski, 2005). And with the so-called obesity epidemic experienced by more than 24% of school children in Australia (Olds et al., 2010; Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2010), school canteens became prime targets for reform (Bell and Swinburn, 2005).