The Story of Childhood by Libby Brooks

Author:Libby Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

In the spring of 2005, the government pledged £280 million to improve school meals, as a result of the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s ‘Feed Me Better’ campaign. His television series Jamie’s School Dinners, which exposed the appalling state of school catering, ambushed public opinion, driving an issue that had long struggled for attention straight to the top of the political agenda. The reintroduction of minimum nutritional standards that had been abolished by the Conservative government when they privatised the service in 1980 was also announced.

But miracles take longer. There was suspicion that the Schools Food Trust, created by the government following the Jamie Oliver series, would simply add another layer of bureaucracy to proceedings. It later emerged that some schools were locked into contracts with private catering firms that would leave them unable to implement changes for years to come.

The ban on junk food and drink from canteens and school vending machines announced in the autumn of 2005 was encouraging. But the transformation of school dinners will require a sustained commitment when local authority control over meals is negligible following the compulsory competitive tendering of the 1980s, and when some schools don’t even have kitchens.

As Jamie Oliver discovered, adults as well as children resist the introduction of healthy foods. A genuine revolution in school meals will need to tackle parental attitudes and marketing to children as well as the basic foodstuffs on offer.

Although childhood obesity remains one of the clearest markers of poverty, malnutrition and bad diet are no longer the preserve of those who cannot afford to eat better. One in five adults are now classified as clinically obese in this country, and obesity in children has increased threefold in the last twenty-five years. The majority of young people eat more than the recommended amounts of salt, sugar and saturated fats, while consuming less than half the recommended amounts of fruit and vegetables.

Inadequate diet in childhood is laying down risks of cancer, heart disease and diabetes in later life, as well as contributing to behavioural problems in youth. There is convincing evidence linking lack of nutrients – in particular omega 3 and 6 fatty acids – to ADHD and autistic spectrum disorders.

For all the concerns that are noisily articulated about childhood today, it is curious that children’s nutrition has only latterly been considered worthy of public action. Perhaps adult ambivalence about food, combined with the stigma that still surrounds obesity, has contributed to this blindspot. Children grow up in a society riven with contradictory messages about food, parented by those who may themselves continue to harbour anxieties around eating habits. On the one hand, what we eat has become a social preoccupation, now variously imbued with messages about status, leisure, love and exoticism. On the other, thinness has never been more prized.

Children are not born demanding burgers. Initial food preferences are biologically driven, the genetic predisposition being to prefer sweet and salty tastes and to dislike bitter and sour ones. These innate preferences are assumed to have served an

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