healthy eating - Doubled Up

I’m really glad Mr Balls is expecting parents to take responsibility for cooking with their children to help avoid obesity.

“I've always been clear that the onus to pass on cooking skills should not just fall on teachers. The fact is that if parents never prepare or eat meals together, then we risk children growing up uninterested in cooking or living healthily.” (Mr Balls, yesterday.)

I have often complained that the knee-jerk reaction to so many problems today is “teach them it in school” or “let the schools deal with it”, without looking at the wider picture.

Personally, I am blessed with a job that I can do at home and can fit around the children, so I can find time to cook fresh meals most of the time (I’m no saint – we have fish fingers often enough) and we don’t rely on ready-made meals. I’ve found that it doesn’t add to the shopping bill – on the contrary, it is much cheaper. If we have a week when I buy pizzas or quiche for speed’s sake, my bill rockets. We also find that having a supermarket or take-away curry no longer tastes so good – it is not the treat it used to be, as we have got used to the taste of quality, fresh food.

Not long ago, my daughter, Milly, was struggling with maths. One of the suggestions her teacher made was to cook more with her and make her read the scales/say how many more grams were needed/say if we had too much or not enough etc. Doing this real-life maths has really helped her skills and has also been fun. Hopefully, in a few years she’ll love it so much that I’ll never have to cook again, though I doubt it – I suspect she’ll be keen to make the things like chocolate brownies and flapjacks, but the spag bol won’t be of interest!

So I can't recommend cooking with children enough.

But, just in case Mr Balls is listening, I will call once again for the government to go further with their plans for healthy living and to look at the ingredients manufacturers are allowed to put in their food, at how they can label food to make it look healthy when it isn’t, to educate people to know that low fat often means high sugar, and to ban advertising to children.

I was reading yesterday about a school (Temple Grove Hatcham in south London) that is offering all children free school meals, without means testing and I take my hat off to them. They found that they already have 60% of children who get free meals after being means tested and decided that the good nutrition of their pupils was important to them. Of equal importance is the social element to eating, so they also make sure that staff and children eat together to "build relationships" and "improve social skills".

Temple Grove Hatcham is offering locally produced, fresh, healthy food that is presented to be inviting to the children that will eat it.

After my battle just to get some answers about what was being provided in lunch boxes to children with free school meals and a lack of response when I queried whether we should not allow crisps and discuss the possibility of not giving children drinks with artificial sweeteners or low-fat yoghurts, I think that it is great that a school is really going out of its way to do something so beneficial for children.

To me it seems that offering healthy food is common sense, but it seems that not many people agree with me (I do recall being asked if I was becoming "one of those governors" for hassling the head teacher about this. The implication being that the children's health in an infant school was of less importance than other issues.)

I am beginning to see that, at times, you just can't win. There really is no pleasing some people. Let me explain…

I think I mentioned our Health and Eco Week in a previous blog. Well, it was absolutely brilliant, as usual! For a whole week, much of the curriculum was taught through these themes. Reception children learnt about repeating patterns by making fruit kebabs. Art involved making faces out of fruit and vegetables, then taking photographs. There was a sponsored 'marathon' to raise funds for an outdoor classroom. The Year 2s analysed how many children walked to school that week compared to other weeks, then recorded the results in various graphs and explained them to the rest of the school using PowerPoint in assembly. Children were asked to count how many times a week they flushed the toilet, showered, bathed etc and then in maths they calculated how much water they used, and how, if they changed their habits, they could cut down their water usage.

There was loads more - science looking at different light bulbs, healthy lunch box competitions etc etc.

Then, what did I hear a parent saying outside class this morning?

"Don't you think they should be concentrating on getting the kids to read and write rather than this environment and health rubbish?"

AAAAARGH!