Experience tells me not to even think of asking if I can be of assistance. If there’s one thing my grandmother isn’t, it’s helpless. This Scotch broth will be made, by her, in this environmental health catastrophe, and I will be having some.
She looks up as I enter, her eyes softening at the sight of uncomplicated, friendly company. But then, the frown.
‘Oh – and where are your lovely children?’
That’s me feeling special, then.
‘Getting to know the local wildlife a bit better, Granny. Best left to it, I think.’
She gives the bubbling liquid a final, vigorous stir, just to make sure there’s nothing either alive or with any nutritional value whatsoever left in there as seems to be the custom with ladies of a certain age, and picks up a ladle.
‘Well that’s a shame. Still, you’ll be having a plate of soup, will you?’
It seems wholly appropriate, as we spoon the thick, surprisingly delicious liquid into our grateful mouths a few minutes later, that our conversation should turn to the nutrition of our children. It’s a subject that spills into our newspapers almost daily, and, like the waistlines of our little darlings, shows no sign whatsoever of decreasing. It has come to obsess the nation, fill more column inches than Jordan’s chest, and bring to their knees a good number of parents who are simply trying to feed their family, but haven’t got a clue what’s OK to eat and what’s not any more.
Before we even start, some facts and, erm, figures.
FACT BOX
OBESITY AND FOOD-RELATED PROBLEMS
The number of children developing Type 2 diabetes – which normally affects overweight people in middle age – has risen tenfold in the past five years.
A Government-instigated survey recently showed that across England almost twenty-three per cent of children aged four to five were overweight or obese, rising to over thirty-one per cent of children aged ten to eleven.
A further 60,000 children are thought to be suffering weight-related metabolic syndrome – a combination of conditions including high blood pressure, raised cholesterol and increased fats in the blood.
Obesity in children causes problems with the joints and bones (such as slipped femoral epiphysis and bow legs), benign intracranial hypertension, hypoventilation, gall bladder disease, polycystic ovary syndrome, high blood pressure, high levels of blood fats and diabetes.
There are also marked psychological effects leading to low self-esteem and obesity is also one of the prime targets of bullying.
The problem is clearly huge. So huge, in fact, that the Government, terrified of the enormous bill the Health Service will face when all of these kids start getting very ill indeed – or possibly because they really do care about the kids in this country. Who knows – is starting to do its bit to help. A £372 million strategy to help everyone lead healthier lives was published in 2008 by Alan Johnson, Health Secretary, and Ed Balls (hee hee. Oh stop it), the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. It pretty much sets out to try and ‘create’ a healthy society, from improving school food and food education, encouraging sport and physical activity and even covering planning and transport issues.
Providing healthy school food is obviously one crucial factor in improving what our kids eat, but for parents there is a much more direct way we can get a grip on our children’s double chocolate muffin tops.
This result starkly illustrates how vital it is that we start making things simple and healthy again on the home front.
It’s time to make things simple again on the home front. So what, according to Granny, should our children be eating, what is good for them, what’s bad and why oh why are so many of them so revoltingly, dangerously, unnecessarily rotund?
‘Well,’ she says, stirring her broth. ‘People often seem to focus on how much food children consume, you know, but really, just as big a problem now is what they are eating.’
‘I’m not sure you’d get many kids these days eating anything as good as this soup, that’s for sure,’ I remark, with a great dollop of tact, a peppering of sincerity and a dash of ‘smart-arse’.
Her spoon comes abruptly to rest at the side of her bowl with a loud clank.
‘Soup?’ she echoes, with disbelief. ‘Auch no. Not soup. Children eat nothing but junk, Elizabeth. I see them on the way to school eating crisps or chocolate bars. They haven’t had any breakfast, and they’ll be down at the chippie for lunch. Or their parents post burgers through the playground railings. It’s no wonder they’re all obese. They’re not eating any proper food.’
‘Now hang on, Granny, children are certainly not all obese, and there are plenty who don’t eat junk food all day long, yet are still getting fat. And there must have been fat kids when you were little too, no?’
‘Well, there were of course some children who were bigger than others, but just look at the old photos of kids back then – school photos and the like. Do you see so many children who are fat? No – we were all eating enough, and very healthy.’
She’s right. In my own school photographs from the late 70s and early 80s, there in the rows of dodgy haircuts, mean outfits and shocking front teeth I can’t see more than three out of a year of sixty who are what you’d even call fat, and none who were obese. But we did eat – I ate a LOT when I was little! – so how come we weren’t fat?
‘Its simple: if you eat real food made of natural ingredients – cooked at home – you won’t get fat, even if you eat quite a lot of it. If children live on manufactured this and reconstituted that, they haven’t a hope.’
Ah, the curse of processed foods. When did it all get so complicated?! Food was once just that: FOOD. Not pretend sugar, or hidden fat, or energy-boosting chemicals, or life-enhancing additives. It was just FOOD. Grown in a muddy field somewhere, or straight out of the back end of an animal, or dangling from the branches of a tree. The farmer gathered it, the shop sold it, we bought it, and we ate it. Simple.
These days finding anything natural or unadulterated means either turning your garden into a farmyard or having more money than you could shake an organic stick at. Either way you need an extraordinary amount of time to grow your own or to actually locate any natural products between the millions of jars of ready-made high-salt sauces, and packets of water-filled meats, and not all of us have that time. Fast food is … erm … faster, so that’s what we turn to time and time again. Until the scales break and we move into velour tracksuits. Mmmmm.
“I contend that most of what