Morning:
8°c
I needed something for supper and was near an Iceland store; they sell good frozen vegetables and seafood. I picked up prawns and peas and queued patiently as a long line of other customers paid for their horrid ready meals, criminally high in fat, sugar, salt and additives. The favourite buy was chicken tikka masala, more garishly red than the lips of a Bollywood tart. It made me bristle.
So it is hardly surprising to hear that healthy school meals are being shunned by many children, according to an official study out yesterday. Public education campaigns and policy initiatives launched by Jamie Oliver are simply ignored by the very classes most at risk. Remember the disgraceful scenes when foolish mums supplied fast food through fences to kids who rejected healthier options? Such parents are winning the battle.
We rightly blame the food and advertising industries for the damaging products they sell and promote. But parents are patronised and never called to account. For that is where unhealthy eating starts. Even those on benefits have purchasing power and could cook properly if they themselves weren't so addicted to microwave fodder.
In the Iceland store yesterday, each ready meal for one cost the same as my prawns, which fed four of us, sautéed in butter and garlic, mixed with fresh peas and a little cream and served with pasta. You don't have to be well off to eat well. In Tanzania this summer, we saw how families with smallholdings plant and cook a variety of fruit and vegetables.
You can buy excellent, cheap ingredients all over London and even in supermarkets. I bought 10 figs for a pound, two-for-one packs of cherry tomatoes and fresh, lean mince costing a fiver this week. And yet more ready meals are eaten here than in the whole of the EU put together. And surprise, surprise, obesity is rising fast.
It is almost a badge of working-class honour, it seems, to keep eating foul food. If these adults were buying cigarettes, booze and drugs for their young ones, we would be appalled. Feeding children rubbish food is just as immoral and dangerous. The NHS will collapse within a decade if these Britons don't change their eating habits.
It's time to name and shame the offenders. Schools should inspect lunchboxes and throw out bad stuff. They should stop pupils leaving the premises to buy chips at lunchtime. Society has a duty of care to all children - and sometimes they have to be protected from those who love them most.
