“The evidence is now undeniable that poor nutrition is putting children’s physical health at risk. Many children are now expected to die before their parents – as a direct result of their unhealthy diets and lifestyles. Many children’s diets are high in sugar, refined starches and the wrong kinds of fats, as well as artificial additives. They are high in calories (energy), but lacking in essential nutrients. The risks to physical health of such a ‘junk food’ diet are now recognized, [and ] the effects of food on behaviour are… very real.”
Dr Alex Richardson author of
Fewer and fewer of us spend time cooking in the kitchen with our children, which is sad enough from a bonding and life-skills point of view – children learn not only how to look after themselves, but also how to count, measure, weigh, and look suitably irritated when it all goes wrong – but what makes it even worse is that it’s been shown that when kids help prepare a meal, they are much more likely to actually eat it. It’s a complete no-brainer in other words!
And just look at what all of this ready-meal culture has done to our kids’ education: In a study in 2007, eleven per cent of eight year olds didn’t know that pork chops come from pigs, eighteen per cent had no idea where yoghurt comes from (it’s from bats’ teardrops, obviously…) and eight per cent of children growing up in cities didn’t know that beef burgers come from cows. And when you realise that two per cent of children think that eggs come from cows, and that bacon is from cows or sheep, you really are left wondering: do they even know what food IS?!
The facts above are not so much surprising (and, let’s admit it, more than a little funny) as brow-wrinklingly depressing. When more children think honey comes from Tesco’s than know how to crack an egg, you know something’s gone seriously wrong not only with their education, but with their home life. I’m not suggesting we should all keep our own bees and hens, of course, but when you cook with a child, even using shop-bought basics as most of us do, you can have those lovely little conversations where matters such as bee keeping, pollination, and Great, Great Aunt Muriel’s perfect method of egg beating crop up, and where such knowledge is passed on to the next generation. And if time for cooking (or the lack of it) is a big issue for you then try this one for starters: go without the television and computer games for a week. Seriously, try it. If you don’t find at least an extra hour in your week to cook together, I’ll eat my hat (and it’s a nice one).
Spilling the beans – was it really all home made back then?
Much as I am enjoying the discussion, I can’t help noticing that in this picture of domestic bliss, something smells fishy. And it’s not fish. Much as I am prepared to believe that Granny cooked almost every meal for her family from basic ingredients and slaved over the stove more than I ever will, surely even morally upstanding people Back Then used to skip the home baking and indulge in a little corner-shop Battenberg or Victoria sponge every so often? Surely they too occasionally cried ‘Oh to hell with these bloody domestic chores’ and gathered around the wireless instead? Granny thinks about this for a moment. I wait for a confession.
‘Well,’ she says at last, ‘it was a little of both, I suppose, but only where you couldn’t make things yourself. You’d never have thought of buying a cake, for instance, and I always made sure there were home-made sweet treats the kids could eat. But we’d buy butteries (the Scottish equivalent of croissant – in other words as much fat as science will allow you to squeeze into a pastry before it explodes – and possibly even a little bit more delicious) from the bakery, and bread was usually bought, but that was it.’
Granny’s Pearl of Wisdom
You don’t need to be a genius to cook for a family. People get so frightened about it, but anyone who can read a cookery book can produce something edible. You just have to have a go!
I am beginning to feel more than slightly inferior now. The last time I baked was only about a fortnight ago, but I’m fairly sure that was under duress because I had someone else’s children round for tea so I was just showing off, and not because I particularly wanted to have a big family cookathon with my kids.
I still want to find some imperfection in this picture of family bliss. Something naughty. Something you and I do on a regular basis.
What about takeaways, I ask? And eating out? Could she put her hand on her heart and tell me that they never treated themselves to the 1950s equivalent of a cheeky Friday night curry, a Sunday pub lunch or a chip butty on the way home from school? Here, at last, I find a chink of reassuring sloppiness.
‘Oh, no, we had our treats! We had a fish supper every Saturday.’ (A ‘fish supper’ is what those of us hailing from South of Quite Far North would call fish ’n’ chips, incidentally.) ‘It was a weekly treat, and there was certainly no worry about it being bad for us, or making the kids fat or unhealthy. Everything else they had was home made or natural, so having fish and chips once a week was absolutely fine. They needed the extra fat to keep warm and growing – it’s cold up here you know, young lady!’
‘I learned to cook at Brownie camp where we cooked over a fire. We made liver and bacon, and little scones. In the 1920s and 30s, we had little indulgences like Rice Crispies and Cornflakes [my, my, they have been around a long time!] but there was no “snack” foods or “junk” foods at all – eating between meals just didn’t happen. Crisps were virtually unheard of, and chocolate bars were either too expensive or too hard to come by when my children were growing up. There were simple biscuits, and snacks by then were a buttery or an apple. Everything else was made by hand, at home. From the scones themselves to the jam that went on them, food was simpler – we’d added salt ourselves, which is frowned upon today, but it didn’t matter because there was no salt hidden in everything from bread to beans. And my children were happy, healthy and enjoying life to the full.’
At this moment I suddenly realise that the house we’re sitting in is a good deal colder than it probably should be for an elderly lady with no circulation in one leg to be sitting in. Having cleared the soup bowls to the kitchen, I go to fetch some more logs from the wood shed to stoke the lounge fire. When I return, Granny is sitting in her favourite chair, surrounded by a year’s supply of newspaper supplements and with a large ginger cat on her lap.
As she strokes and he purrs, she tells me her last