Do people really not know what to eat?

[WilderHawthorn]

Watching ‘what not to eat’, and the family they’ve found are just hopeless. Four small children all shovelled full of UPF junk, parents both obese, freely admit to eating crap constantly.

How adults choose to feed themselves is their choice, but to feed four small kids that much junk? It’s bordering on abuse. An apple/banana costs the same as a packet of crisps, jacket potato is one of the cheapest meals you can make, basic porridge oats and milk for breakfast, it’s not difficult to eat whole foods, so why rely on packaged things?

Freely admit I judge those who feed their children this way and truly despair over childhood obesity stats. I work full time, have 4 DC, DH works full time and I volunteer. I’m very time poor and partially disabled, I still feed my kids well and it doesn’t cost me a fortune. Taught myself to cook. There’s no excuse!

No they don’t. The vast majority of schools don’t even have cooking/food tech classrooms.

Exactly this

Junk Food Kids - great documentary

I mean this is what we tell 5 year olds at school so they don't feel bad about the crap they often eat at home. We call them 'treat foods' instead.

As adults i think we can cope with the truth. A deep friend doughnut with jam in the middle and coated in flour is absolutely 'bad food'. There are plenty of others!

For a PP it's also not 'good' to have a balance of good food and crap junk food - It's better than eating crap everyday but it's not nearly as good as eating healthily every day. The stuff people delude themselves with!

Which to be fair he explained that it's not OUR fault that we eat a whole packet of biscuits in one go. Manufacturers have spent billions on making sure we like biscuits and will keep eating them even when we're full.

Salt, fat and sugar. An unbeatable winning combination.

Beautiful reply and echoed exactly what I was going to say, but you got there first, and wrote it better than I would have.

They should be:

In the UK, basic cooking and food technology (often called Cooking and Nutrition) is mandatory for all students up to age 14 (Key Stage 3) as part of the Design and Technology curriculum, covering skills like nutrition, hygiene, and practical cooking, with GCSEs becoming optional later.

I do think sometimes there is so much food advice out there now it can be overwhelming if home cooking is not something you learnt growing up. A jacket potato or homemade porridge are healthier than chicken nuggets or sausage rolls, but there are people on here who'd be clutching their pearls about 'too many carbs' and 'all that sugar'. I can see why it's easy to think it's all too complicated so better to stick to what you know your kids will eat.

They don’t - 6 bags of crisps are about a quid - 6 apples are £2+.

I haven’t read the whole thread but if the parents are obese then chances are they make poor decisions around food themselves and are unlikely to cook their kids a bean stew for dinner if they are not cooking one for themselves.

a lot of families use food to ‘treat’ or to bribe - because it’s cheap (in comparison to a trip to the cinema) and

Atlhough why people think they need stock cubes or sachets of spice mixes is another whole thread.

These add taste to the food, I would have thought.🤔 I use lots of different seasonings/ spices in my cooking. I could not do without my stock cupboard.

I haven’t seen this particular series but there was a similar Tom Kerridge one a few years ago where he showed people how to cook fairly standard meals. What surprised me was how unabashed/unembarrassed people were when admitting that they never cooked, many with quite nice kitchens that were pristine.

Apples and bananas go out of date. Crisps last ages. Apples and bananas can have grotty stuff going on inside that makes kids reject them

Crisps arent normally bought to last for ages thogh when they are bought as part of the family shop.

If you are bothered about grotty' stuff in apples and bananas, you can always chop them up in advance and offer as part of a fruit salad or as a dessert or snack.

Exactly this. Especially kids. The longer I spend cooking something healthy and hearty for the family, the less likely the children are to eat it.

There is such a thing as unhealthy food though. Yes most foods within the right diet or for certain people are not bad (eg, chocolate or sweets aren’t ‘bad’ if you’re a frail, malnourished person who needs the calories!)

But some foods are unhealthy for everyone… processed meat with nitrates (carcinogen) for example.

I was a teacher until 3 years ago and now work in the leadership team of a large multi academy trust. I can assure you not one of our secondary schools has a space for teaching food tech/cooking.

In the last state school I taught in they closed the food tech classroom and turned it into an intervention room.

My daughter is doing food lessons in her school (Y8) but no practicals.

God I remember a thread a while back with some poor mum asking (like why ask on here!!) if it was ok to give her son porridge for tea because thats what he wanted

Guess what the tone of the replies were!!!!

Exactly this.

Can we not have a discussion about this without bleating about being “disingenuous”? You may disagree with me, but I wasn’t being remotely disingenuous. I was trying to point out that perspectives on what is and isn’t healthy/processed/good enough vary so widely according to background, education, experience etc that it’s more complicated than simply “making an effort” or not.

Thank goodness the poster my comment was addressed to understood it, and didn’t resort to insults.

I put bananas in the freezer when they start looking a bit past their best, (unpeeled) and stew apples that are getting a bit squishy, then freeze them, then defrost them so I can mix them in with DS's Weetabix or porridge.

My DDs are 22 and 25 and had minimal cooking lessons at school. It was on a rotation on the timetable with sewing and tech in the first 2 years of high school and when DD2 was in S2 there were so few teachers in our council area qualified to teach food and nutrition that the school had to prioritise those preparing for external exams so her class had extra Spanish instead.

Being underweight is no better.

Yes, spice cupboard, I have 2 of them. I dont have any or use any stock cubes or spice sachets. They cost a bomb and usually have a load of other rubbish in them but now Im sounding extremist like those I was complaining about

The point is, people think they cant cook without buying these, they're not necessary, just have a stock of basic spices in the cupboard, they'll last, they're cheaper, and more flexible.

You have to differentiate imo between convenience foods and takeaway

eg KFC which is deep fried unhealthier than frozen chicken nuggets

Its not that easy when you have the pester power of kids for sweets etc. Our oldest was not that bothered but now the younger who is got him onto it

We try and find healthy foods they like. Son loves apples and will eat bananas, Daughter bananas and have got here on to boiled eggs. They both like baked potatoes and chicken

We probably have a takeaway every 2-4 weeks, the kids don't like the really unhealthy stuff anyway

Kindly op you're speaking from immense privilege in the wider sense of the word.

Not everyone does know that certain foods have different health benefits and the details of this. Then you add in poverty and that a lot of low-nutrient food is marketed and priced towards lower income families never mind vulnerable parents with learning difficulties who don't get the support available to those with learning disabilities or those who are working through generational trauma and who were neglected themselves as children and who didn't grow up with the positive example/ access to information others had. You also have kids with restrictive diets and sensory needs around food. There's also a massive link between diet and mental wellbeing, if you're exhausted and low in resilience you're more likely to crave food high in sugar to release energy and dopamine. Most healthy foods release sugar in a more sustained and slower way so doesn't meet that 'need'. That's particularly difficult for those who have experienced trauma and have ptsd. Not everyone does have access to public health messaging when you add in language barriers. Domestic abuse victims also often see food weaponised in their homes as a way to control and undermine parenting.

It's very, very complex and it can't be reduced to simply laziness. Most people care deeply about their children and do 'their best' with what's available to them at the time.

It's not just food knowledge.

The Mum in that programme was working so hard to adapt and adopt the new meal plans and made such heartfelt protests about the amount of washing up the prep and cooking created - she clearly didn't have a dishwasher in that tiny kitchen.

And prepping food from scratch for a family of 6 does often take time. Chopping and peeling decent amounts of veg takes time.

I cook from scratch all the time and am a decently experienced cook, but all recipes take me loads longer than they say. Apart from the fact that onions always take longer to properly soften and rice and potatoes to cook, I do not have chef knife skills. When I watch Jamie on telly, telling us how quick something is to knock up I then see him dice an onion in the time it take me to get the skin off.

I just made spiced carrot and lentil soup for 4. First instruction :peel and grate 600g of carrots. Bloody ages with a grater or otherwise haul out the Magimix, assemble the grating set-up...grate in a flash...then wash the whole lot up. Actually what I did was slice the carrots and cook for a bit longer, because I have the confidence to re-work instructions. Still took ages compared to opening a tin of soup

It gets quicker with practice, as that Mum found, and she and the Dad worked really hard at it. And changed their lives. They needed help - and they responded well to that help.