Children and food - the importance of a good meal

Prue Leith wasn’t pulling any punches last week when she used her valedictory speech as chair of the School Food Trust to criticise parents for allowing their children to have ‘all-the-chips-you-can-eat for a pound’ rather than pay for a healthy school meal. Acknowledging that she had underestimated the challenge the Trust faced to influence children’s attitude to food she blamed parents for infecting their children with poor eating habits and lamented the decline in family meals around the dining table. She also turned her guns on the producers of crisps and chocolate for directing their huge marketing budgets at children and selling them junk.

This was a perfect example of how we cannot educate in a vacuum. Since Jamie Oliver’s crusade in 2005, rigorous nutritional standards have been introduced and the quality of school dinners has risen but, however much effort schools may make to produce appetising food and to educate young people about a balanced diet, promoting healthy eating for kids will be a struggle if the home has not provided a good foundation.

I’ll come clean, I am a traditionalist when it comes to the central importance of meal times not just to appreciate well-prepared, tasty food as one of life’s pleasures but for the central socialising role that coming together for a meal plays in developing the ability to converse with confidence, listen and have meaningful discussion plus, if you are lucky, witty repartee. It’s also around food in the home that children learn a great deal, naturally, about shared responsibility: about helping to cook, lay and clear the table and wash up; about noticing the needs of others so passing the jug of water or the salt.

Miss Leith did not spare schools either and berates head-teachers and governing bodies for not being committed enough to quality food being served in their schools. But what does it mean to be committed? Commitment means employing a catering manager who understands what good food is and is prepared to encourage creativity in her chefs; it means recruiting and training chefs who are concerned enough to make sure that the students are enjoying their food and will seek feedback about different menus; its means ensuring that there is enough variety and choice for pupils to have a balanced meal and it means making sure that good quality ingredients are used and that presentation is appetising. Also, although it is good to involve students in discussion about food and to listen to their feedback, it is important to retain professional responsibility to educate and to broaden pupils’ horizons about what they might try rather than simply to pander to their whims.

I expect some readers have bitter memories of their own school food: of being made to eat everything on your plate, of gristle, boiled cabbage, overcooked pig’s liver and semolina that made your retch so it would be a mistake to be nostalgic about some golden age. But the history of food in this country over the past half century is one of two halves. One half began when people started to go abroad en masse and is the story of incorporating foreign influences to make food much more interesting. The other is of processed and fast foods; snacking; the TV in the room; eating in the street; fads; allergies and a burgeoning problem with obesity. Miss Leith believes teaching children to LIKE good food is as important to their future success as being literate or numerate. In the interests of building a civilised society, she may be right.