Prue Leith doesn’t think people will adopt healthier lifestyles just because the powers that be ´keeping banging on about it´. Education and time is what’s required, she says…
Reports about poor nutrition causing obesity, heart attacks, diabetes, stroke, early death, etc are not media-invented scare stories. But I don’t think banging on about them is the way to get the nation to change its lifestyle.
What we need to promote is the benefits of healthy lifestyles rather than the dire consequences of stuffing our faces with chips and chocolate or pigging out in front of the telly. We need a bit more about how good it feels to get to the top of the stairs without puffing or to do a twirl in front of the mirror without wincing.
interest
But most of all we need to interest people in food. Ever since the 1960s, when the ´white heat of technology´ was going to solve all our problems, we have downgraded the importance of good food and cooking. I remember a Tomorrow’s World about how we’d be able to swallow a few pills to provide all our nutrients and thus free women from the slavery of shopping, cooking and washing up. Thanks a lot, I thought, that’s my job gone!
We need to put food back to where it once was: one of the most important, if not the most important, thing in our lives. And to do that we have to start with school children. Yes, parents, toddlers, pregnant mums, all matter, but school children are easier to get to, and they are easily influenced.
We’ve come a long way in three years. Schools now have to provide healthy lunches, and are judged on how many children eat them. Junk is banned. Water, milk and juice are provided instead of fizzy pop. All children can now learn to cook at school. But all this good work could be easily reversed if we are not vigilant.
If good food in schools slips as a priority, then the manufacturers will win the battle for the taste buds of the nation. Selling fat, sugar, and salt to children is a walk in the park for them. Junk may be banned in schools, but schools are surrounded by corner shops, chippy vans, fast food outlets and ice-cream vendors. We need children to LIKE healthy food. And that takes education and time.
Prue Leith is a food writer, novelist and honorary graduate of the OU. She has just stepped down as chair of the School Food Trust
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Comments
I agree that the key is to influence kids to eat well when they're young and that school food has an important role to play in this. There has definitely been a change in what's on offer at my kids' schools in recent years, and generally it seems to be for the better. At the same time, the snack and fizzy drinks machines have also been removed. Even so, at my youngest's school, when the team producing the food is under pressure, the first thing to disappear is the salad bar!
Oftened it is peer pressure that encourages individuals to eat what they perceive is a healthy diet.
And there is of course the marketing of certain types of food which we are told are the healthy alternative with less fat, salt etc. Surely we all realize now that what manufactured foods contain.
Food is fuel, but the social aspects of diet, dieting and fashionable eating encourage a disregard to
consider how food is used in every day life by individuals to maintain health.
My daughter is very lucky in that both schools she has been to have had very good, healthy lunches that she actually prefers to the dinners we cook at home, which is amazing (but frustrating for my husband who is brilliant at cooking!). It possibly also helps that school lunches are the norm and charged as the default unless parents choose to opt out and provide packed lunches.
<Despite the Jamie Oliver effect, my daughter's school still serves up chips, pizza and chocolate cake and other greasy, fatty foods most days. >
It shouldn't still be doing that now that compulsory nutritional standards have been introduced for school food!
What I'm seeing now in research with schools is that the school meals have been made healthier and the less healthy food has mostly been removed - but the children feel the new offerings are a disappointment. Just as expensive as the less healthy food they've replaced (or more expensive), limited choice, not so tasty, and the dining experience is still unpleasant and time-pressured. Compared with the appeal of going to Greggs - socialising outside school, making independent choices, bags of affordable choices - school lunches are still falling short. It's not enough giving children the healthy eating message (which, to be fair, most of them have absorbed) if the healthy eating 'products' we give them don't deliver.
Despite the Jamie Oliver effect, my daughter's school still serves up chips, pizza and chocolate cake and other greasy, fatty foods most days. At the same time parents get letters home urging us to make sure our packed lunches are packed with healthy options. Even the kids see the conflict in these messages. If what I send from home is healthier than what is served in school, it is going to be an uphill struggle to convince parents that school meals are the answer to healthy eating.