School lunch nannies can't win the battle of the bulge

It's a fatalistic vision that Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools etc, doesn't share. In common with all New Labourites, he's an unreconstructed Utilitarian: devoted to achieving the greatest happiness of the greatest number by the greatest possible government intervention in our lives. So he's spearheading a twopronged attack on the Trojan Pig of childhood obesity: on one tine are the kind of healthy school dinners promoted by chirpy mockney Jamie Oliver, on the other, new rules on what can go in kids' packed lunches.

I suppose the hope is that by banning snacks and fatty foods from lunch boxes, those kids - and parents - who rebelled against the healthy school dinners will be forced to eat healthily. But I bet they won't. Schools only have kids for one meal a day, and even if their parents aren't so junk-food-crazed that they shove McDonald's through the railings, the second they step outside they're assailed by the siren song of cheap fat, cheaper sweets and bargain-basement salty foods.

No, the obesity pandemic is, like so many of our social ills, the flip-side of New Labour's easy-over relationship with the US model of economic growth: he who thinks American eats American. Now we're seriously comfortable with the seriously rich, and our own old organic society is in the bin, so we have a burgeoning USstyle underclass, welfare and junkfood-dependent in equal measure.

The Government's gestures are all nanny-state options for a nation that behaves like a dysfunctional family when it comes to sitting down and eating: we don't do it together, we binge drink and binge eat too much, and as for exercise - forget it.

But I blame the loss of our school playing fields, the increase in car travel and the advertising of food retailers actually in our schools for this, quite as much as the nutritional composition of school dinners or packed lunches.

Once you start with the nannying, where does it all stop? I'm afraid the latest "rules" on what should go in packed lunches exemplify this to a T (although not a teacake). According to the School Food Trust, a healthy lunchbox might contain "sliced roast beef with a mixed vegetable rice salad" on one day and a "chicken tortilla wrap with sweet pepper, carrot and tomato slices" on the next.

You can just picture the policy wonk coming up with this startling notion: if we can get the underclass to eat this stuff, then magically they'll become upwardly-mobile middleclass high-achievers. As Homer Simpson would say: "Doh!"