Saturday 29 October, 3.30pm until 5.00pm, Café
Yasmin refuses to eat her greens, and left to his own devices, Timmy would scoff jam sandwiches three times a day: children are notoriously fussy eaters. Yet with growing fears over childhood obesity and the pressure to make sure we’re not ‘killing our kids’ with junk food, the tussle over the dining table is no longer simply a matter of teatime tantrums. With high profile campaigns led by TV programmes like Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners and government initiatives such as Change4Life, the job of getting kids off turkey twizzlers and onto ‘five a day’ has become an increasing focus of education and public health policy. Whether it’s classes on nutrition, family vouchers for fruit & veg and even instances of rewarding or punishing kids for the contents of their lunchboxes, today’s generation of youngsters are encouraged at every turn to think twice about the food on their plates.
It seems the days when parents simply told their children to eat what was in front of them are over. But if mums and dads are constantly told off for feeding their kids fatty foods, and with increasing calls to weigh pupils at school to defuse the ‘obesity timebomb’, is it any wonder many of today’s youngsters have an unhealthily confused attitude to what’s on the dinner plate? Some worry that concern over children’s bad diets only contributes to the danger of eating disorders. Given the cultural pressure on teenagers to keep skinny, with parents observing that kids start fretting about their weight younger and younger, it seems there is a very narrow line to tread between encouraging kids to watch what they eat, and ensuring they feel comfortable with themselves and don’t worry needlessly about getting fat.
Given that we live in such a food conscious age, do we have a responsibility to ensure children have all the information and guidance they need to cope with conflicting pressures, or does relentless dietary education only add official sanction to an already paranoid attitude towards what we eat? Are extremes of ‘unhealthy eating’ becoming the norm, or are we allowing a few rare examples to skew our perceptions of what’s normal? Might moralising around ‘good’ and ‘bad’ food choices at an early age only indulge the fussy instincts of children?
Listen to session audio:
David King director, Dking.com; specialist in online marketing and communication strategies | |
Lucy McDonald freelance writer and journalist; food blogger, www.crumbsfood.co.uk | |
Jane Sandeman convenor, IoI Parents Forum; contributor, Standing up to Supernanny; director of finance and central services, Cardinal Hume Centre | |
Jackie Schneider teacher, parent and food campaigner; chair, Merton Parents for Better Food in Schools | |
Chair: | |
Justine Brian
director, Debating Matters Competition |
The regular calls for a fat tax – whether on the ‘wrong’ foods or on fat people themselves – are symptomatic of two regressive trends in society.
Rob Lyons, Independent, 3 November 2011In the last eighty years the proportion of household income spent on food has dropped from a third to less than a tenth. Fruit and vegetables from around the world are on the shelves all year round.
Chris Snowdon, Free Society, 3 October 2011Articles about
Laurie Penny, Guardian, 2 August 2011Children as young as five are being treated in hospital for severe anorexia in a shocking illustration of how early they can become obsessed with body image.
Sophie Borland, Daily Mail, 1 August 2011A survey hailing the impact of healthy school dinners on kids’ capacity to learn is not as smart as it thinks.
Rob Lyons, spiked, 18 April 2011There’s no such thing as ‘children’s food’. Once a baby has been weaned on to solid food, there is just ‘food’. Yet up and down the aisles of Britain’s supermarkets we can see extensive packaging that describes lots of processed foods as ‘children’s food’.J
Jackie Schneider, spiked, 20 May 2010Parents are quite capable of feeding their children - despite what the government's School Food Trust would have us believe.
Jane Sandeman, spiked, 12 December 2006