British kids and eating habits - IABU ?

My kid’s nursery is lovely - great location for playing and fantastic staff - but I hear you on kids food. Ditto bars and restaurants. It’s pasta with garlic bread, cheese and crackers and not a bloody vegetable or bit of fruit in sight. Why can’t kids eat salad and protein same as adults in these places? Often it’s nuggets or fish and chips on the menu and I end up ordering my daughter a starter because it is a better option.

i think challenge for schools and at home can often be cost of fresh high quality ingredients so I do get the issue plus if parents are working multiple jobs can also be challenging to cook from scratch. Certainly mince and options like carrots and frozen peas etc can make options like bolognese and batch freezing a viable option but I think the cost of living crisis and pressure on people to work crazy hours is responsible a big driver.

fyi my partner is French and he complaints about the quality of ingredients in UK as a limiting factor and I moan right back that he (and his folks) are too free and easy with the brioche, chocolate so I think also sometimes just what you’re used to! 🤣 no country is perfect

You're absolutely right about poor eating habits being rife in the UK.

Unfortunately, we have followed the US (as we tend to) into 'normality' being eating lots of convenience foods that are riddled with UPFs.

Of course, it's not everyone - many kids eat healthily here - but poor diet is very common, especially in children.

The trend for starchy puddings with school meals started in the post-war era, when kids, if anything, needed fattening up. Maybe encourage your kids to take the yogurt or fruit option, instead of cakes/puddings?

It is interesting that 2 of the examples you give of 'junk' foods, baked beans and fish fingers, are two of the UPF containing foods that experts state children should still eat, as the nutritional value outweighs the minimal poor ingredients (fish fingers are not pre-fried, by the way).

It sounds like you're doing a great job of cooking from scratch at home. A few treats here and there won't hurt.

I read a while back that catering companies were complaining about the rising cost of food, and school lunches were now costing 95p per pupil per day for the actual food (not preparation/transport/other costs) instead of the previous 85p.

95p?? It’s no wonder they’re serving shit.

GameOfJones
This is where lunch is a chore, he doesn’t eat cheese sandwiches and I’d never subject their tiny classroom to tuna or egg. Sometimes I give jam which I know is a whole other problem but it’s literally to tide them over to get them home so they can have home food instead!

We don’t have juices or squashes in our house as I think they’re bloody awful, so your holier than thou attitude has let you down a bit there.

You aren’t ‘weird’ at all, plenty of families have healthy diets. Some will eat just like you, some will be better and some will be worse.

I doubt most parents give their children a ham sandwich every day for packed lunch. There will be children due to their disability who will only eat certain food who are likely to eat ham every day.

BTW My DD, who can't eat cheese, would eat a fish sandwich every day if I allowed her.

Well it isn't meant as a condemnation of any individual but a general observation. If people have full trolly and its all pre-packaged ready meals and unhealthy snacks then it seems unlikely they are buying all that and then popping back for some celeriac, fennel and other fresh produce on a daily basis. People who don't eat a lot of convenience food may have things like pasta or tins of chickpeas and bags of flour but they don't have a microwavable chicken korma, packets of instant noodles, snack bars, crisps and the like. It is fairly easy to see what kind of diet it is likely people have and much of it is poor.

Now when I say all that I know it is a privilege to have the time, skills and money to cook and eat good quality food but the question was about the quality of peoples diet and it is for the large part of bad quality in the UK.

The school meals don't bother me much but DD's primary school drives me crazy with how many times she comes out of school eating sweets!
Asked school not to them straight to her and give them to us instead (she's just turned 6) and they said it's not upto them because other children bring them in to share 🙄

Now I'm not the sugar police but I don't want her eating a packet of haribo every bloody day (almost) for the next 5 years.

OP - where are you from?

I agree OP. I also disagree with PP who say it's not just a British issue. OK, the US are just as bad but the majority of Europe does not eat like this.

DD is now 6 and I already feel like we are that weird family that doesn't eat like everyone else. She had friends round the other day and we had these natural low sugar juices and her friends said "do you like this? It's so sour!". I'd never thought of them as sour at all, they're delicious, but I guess they would be compared to the sugary squash they have daily.

I'm even starting to feel my own standards slipping as DC used to eat anything and everything but have only become fussier with age and the food they get at school.

There are lots of British parents who despair at school dinners too. It’s the state school dinners budgets that’s the problem. I do wish they’d spend the pudding budget on vegetables and scrap the pudding though.

Not all parents have the time or the money to do healthy packed lunches. But if you have the time to do so, just send your kids in with a healthy packed lunch and a bottle of water. As long as they’re eating healthily when you are controlling their meals they will be fine if they have sausage chips and ketchup on the odd occasion they stay for dinner at a friends house.

As for baked beans, i buy the Tesco’s organic ones - they seem fine to me. My kids are fussy despite my best efforts and I work long hours so they often have baked beans on toast for dinner (homemade bread). Or eggs on toast. Or peanut butter on toast!

I genuinely mean this nicely.... giving your children a ham sandwich every day is definitely not healthy. As has already been said, processed meat like ham is a proven carcinogen. If you make no other changes at least alternate it with cheese sandwiches or tuna etc.

Yes, I am absolutely sure that Italian children don't eat pizza, that French children don't eat frites, that Belgian children don't eat waffles and German children don't eat bratwurst sausages (sorry for the stereotyping, but just using these as a very obvious example)

But is it exclusively British? I lived with a French family for a while and they always had pudding. Mostly a yoghurt or little chocolate dessert, true, but still pudding.

JollyPinkFox
understood. Have a good evening x

I didn’t say I just eat fruit salad for breakfast, I normally have my fruit with kefir, Greek yoghurt, nuts and seeds.

I don’t have any issues with how I eat, I was merely saying the sweet thing for after dinner is bizarre to me, especially as we didn’t do it growing up much, but my parents do it daily now.

Plus I’m an ex-vegetarian so black pudding is the devils food!

I take it by your username that you love coffee. I don’t. I hate the stuff. It raises my blood pressure and makes me feel
like shit. I think it has terrible side effects and yet “continentals” drink it all the time. They also eat lots of sweet things - pastries, pains, cakes. And drink a lot more than people in the UK.

I’ve lived extensively in various countries all over Europe. Let me tell you what I’m sure you already know; lots of “continentals” also have big issues with smoking too much, and rural communities are rife with domestic abuse, and alcoholism along with terrible educational/career prospects. Crap for kids basically.

In my mind this is worse than eating a sausage so I’ll stay here and take my chances with the UPF

This thread really makes me want to wangle a sausage in the OP's face!

Thanks. This entire thread appears to be an attack on British food.

It's not a British thing, it's a class thing (which, of course, IS a British thing).

No idea what all the uproar about pudding is. I have something small and sweet to finish each meal. This is a fairly common practice across most European cultures in my experience e.g. coffee and a little biscuit/chocolate. It doesn't have to be a huge wedge of cake.

Your attitude to food is terrible. (And if you know anything about cooking, you know you need to balance out the acidity of tomatoes with something sweet).

So your parents are getting it right. Fruit salad is fine for breakfast, but you should be eating something more sustaining. And you cannot get better than: fried/poached/scrambled eggs, bacon, black pudding, baked beans, tomatoes, mushrooms and possibly toast for breakfast. You will not need to eat until dinner.

Yes - a lot of people say well there’s fresh fruit and veg on offer but realistically when there’s other more junky options on offer, the kids don’t generally choose/eat the fruit and veg! (In our primary canteen anyway!)

Me too 😅 20% salt, 10% sugar (of your daily recommended intake, really not that bad btw) must be 70% beans then! No, that's really not how that works🙈

Well, I rarely have a dessert. But what is wrong with ending a meal properly with a sweet course, cheese and fruit? More food Puritans!

My parents are the same!! I never eat dessert at home, none of our family do, it’s not a thing, but at my parents there is always cake or homemade fruit salad (which I love but prefer for breakfast) and I fall into their trap of eating it too when we stay. Cake and custard…yet my dad is the slimmest, fittest man I know. He’s never ill, he’s in great shape and has amazing mental health. I always joke that he needs to be studied.