Several weeks ago, photographs of two mothers delivering pies and chips through the railings of Rawmarsh comprehensive in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, caused outrage. Their children, they said, didn't like the food being served by the school as part of southern shandy-drinker Jamie Oliver's healthy-eating campaign and were now not eating at all. Since the school locked the gates at lunchtime, the kids were forced to remain inside - a policy that was even more damaging to their health, considering the only exercise they got previously was foraging for chicken nuggets.

The photo of Julie Critchlow and Sam Walker squeezing burgers through a fence was shown last week on television to Jamie Oliver, who was a guest on Jonathan Ross's chatshow. The pair tutted. Oliver went on to tell of a young mother bottle-feeding her baby with cola while complaining that her kids wouldn't eat posh food like shepherd's pie, while Ross suggested something be put in the water supply of council estates. One's sympathies immediately switched to the refusenik mothers.

Now anecdotes reach us of a spate of incidents involving children in south London who have injured themselves while trying to escape their school, over the locked gates, in search of burgers and chips. The staff on the accident and emergency ward have taken to referring to them as "Jamies", as in, "We've got another Jamie, hurt himself falling from the school fence".

While not every school is home to fast-food-obsessed kids planning Colditz-style breakouts in order to clog their arteries with delicious saturated fats, there is evidence that the government's celebrity chef-inspired initiative is not running as smoothly as anticipated. In many schools children don't have time to eat because of the demands of serving the new menu, and there is less choice (non-vegetarians are denied the vegetarian offering, for example). Furthermore, the new menus haven't been brought in with education as to what the dishes actually are. If you have been brought up eating processed food, spaghetti bolognese translates as spaghetti and brown slop. Because of this, whenever I ask my kids what they ate for lunch, the normal response is "rice" or "potato", the main dish being ignored because it looked disgusting. This is probably my fault for forcing them to eat chicken in the shape of dinosaurs.

While most parents are grateful for what Oliver has achieved, he and the campaign are now bordering on food fascism. If the Rotherham mothers had appeared on Dragon's Den, they would have been applauded for their enterprise; as it was, they were treated like crack dealers. They also stopped any of the kids "doing a Jamie", a great service to the school and the health system.