FOOD FOR THOUGHT

How much good can a single hungry schoolkid accomplish with a little grit, determination …and a website? More than you’d think.

THE CRITIC

Martha Payne was a nine-year-old girl at Lochgilphead Primary School on the west coast of Scotland. She liked to write and she was also interested in nutrition, so in the spring of 2012 her father helped her set up a website called NeverSeconds, where she could critique the lunches served at school. Each day Martha rated her meals on a scale of 1 to 10 for both taste (“food-o-meter”) and healthiness. She also counted the number of mouthfuls, as well as the number of hairs she found in her food, and she posted a picture of each meal on her site.

Martha was frank about what she liked and didn’t like about her lunches. On May 8, 2012, for example, she was served a small slice of cheese pizza, a muffin, a single croquette (similar to a tater tot), and a few spoonfuls of sweet corn on a food tray that looks half empty. Martha gave it a food-o-meter score of 6, and a health score of 4. The pizza was “alright,” she wrote, but the meal was too small. Mouthfuls: “forgot to count but not enough!…I’d have enjoyed more than one croquette. I’m a growing kid and I need to concentrate all afternoon and I can’t do it on one croquette. Do any of you think you could?”

FOOD FIGHT

School lunches vary in quality and quantity from one part of the UK to another, but Martha’s reviews suggested that primary schools in Scotland clearly had some catching up to do. School officials were embarrassed. About a month after Martha started her reviews, she was pulled out of class by the head teacher and told that the local Argyll and Bute government council, which runs the school, had banned Martha from taking any more pictures of her lunches.

Over the next 24 hours, Martha’s website received more than 2 million visits from people all over the world. Many expressed outrage over the fact that Martha had been silenced.

When Martha reported the development on her website in a post titled “Goodbye” and announced that she was ending her school lunch reviews, the BBC and other news outlets covered the story; within hours it began spreading virally on Facebook and other social media sites. Over the next 24 hours, Martha’s website received more than 2 million visits from people all over the world. Many expressed outrage over the fact that Martha had been silenced.

The average human consists of 125,820 calories.

That was all it took: The next day, after being pressured by Mike Russell, Scotland’s Education Secretary, the Argyll and Bute council reversed itself and allowed Martha to resume taking pictures of her lunches. The school had already announced that students would be allowed unlimited servings of fruit, vegetables, and bread with their lunches (though it claimed that this had always been the policy).

“Well my friends and I never knew that,” Martha wrote. “It must have been a well-kept secret.”

LUNCH MONEY

Bonus: When Martha launched the NeverSeconds website in April 2012, in the upper right corner she posted a link to a fund-raising page for Mary’s Meals, a charity that provides food aid to schools in developing countries. When the photo ban caused visits to her website to soar, donations to the charity also climbed, from £2,000 (about $2,700) before the controversy to more than £90,000 ($125,000) in just a few days. That was more than enough to build a new kitchen at an elementary school in the African nation of Malawi.

Martha continued posting her lunch reviews until the end of the 2012 summer school term. After that, she posted less frequently. Like most nine-year-olds, she had lots of interests and was eager to move on to other things. But she invited schools around the world to continue contributing their own photographs and posts, so that kids everywhere could see what their peers in other countries were eating.

Martha’s last post was in February 2014, when she reported that her website had received its 10-millionth hit, and had raised more than £131,000 ($183,000) for Mary’s Meals. And that’s enough money to feed 12,300 schoolchildren in Malawi for an entire year.

TONY’S TONYS

The Tony Awards are named after American Theatre Wing cofounder Antoinette Perry. Three Tonys have won Tonys: costume designer Tony Duquette (for Camelot in 1961), scenic designer Tony Walton—three times, for Pippin (1972), The House of Blue Leaves (1986), and Guys and Dolls (1992)—and playwright Tony Kushner, who won for Best Play twice, for each part of Angels in America: 1993’s Millennium Approaches and 1994’s Perestroika.

The person who said “previously on Lost” on Lost was ABC chairman Lloyd Braun…