I despair - the healthy eating message in schools

[FurtherSupport]

I really have tried with my DC. I believe the best diets have everything in moderation, lots of fruit and veg, plenty of protein, fats so long as it's not so much it's you overweight, avoid processed food and artificial rubbish and include minimal sugar and refined carbs.

I'm in no way obsessive about it, but this is what we aim for.

The message from schools is all low fat and replace sugar with sweetners. At the school where I work they serve an ice lolly that is basically coloured flavoured water as dessert. It's low in fat, sugar and salt and therefore must be healthy.

DS1 is just back from cadet camp and thrilled to tell me how unhealthy the food has been because he's had a cooked breakfast every morning before going out on the moors for a long active day. OTOH, he thinks (despite me continually telling him otherwise) that the fruit cola they sell at school is healthy because it says on the bottle it contains one of your five a day

There'd be no marked for that product as a treat though moving, cos the kids would prefer haribo and straightforward sweets are much cheaper. It's whole reason for being is to make money out of caring parents who are trying to follow guidelines and give DC a decent diet.

No market...

I would totally be behind a campaign too, unfortunately I'm not an influential person I'm just normal. How do you share this with someone who could do something with it? Twitter?

Taking a while to catch up on all posts but just wanted to agree wholeheartedly with this from several pages back:

I think the schools/government should concentrate on teaching children how to cook.

Yes, because if you can cook a decent range of healthy, family friendly meals from cheap but REAL ingredients, you are less likely to want to rely 100% on junk food and ready meals (or the 'healthy version' of said ready meals which are full of crap regardless of their label).

That said, from reading several posts on here over the years, food tech in schools can be woefully inadequate. For example I'm sure I read at least one where the list of ingredients to buy included some ready made sauce or something. And in my very pushy grammar in the early 00s, we had about half a year of food tech (was part of DT) in which we made TWO meals. One pasta dish (where we directly compared to equivalent ready meals, so a valuable thing to do) and... a sandwich. Because we spent so long on paperwork, planning, evaluating etc, we had no sodding time to actually cook much. Way to miss the point.

The Mumsnet Real Food Revolution

Ooh, love that name! Couldn't it be something like the Let Toys Be Toys thing which I bitterly regret not being a part of as I was unwell at the time so MN can just be the starting point without having to run it themselves?

It shouldn't be food tech - bring back proper domestic science (for boys and girls) for say years 8 and 9. 98% of secondary schools still have a kitchen, which should be useable for teaching after lunch is over. Include how to buy food, rip-offs to avoid, when food really needs chucking out, how to make half a dozen savoury dishes. Which convenience foods are really useful (chopped/sieved tomatoes, jars of minced garlic, frozen spinach, tinned beans), which aren't. Fund it from the outreach funds boroughs have for trying to teach adults to cook which mostly goes on tracking down enough adults to run a class, plus some public health spending.

Add some basic sewing and budgeting/legal knowledge and it would be a damn useful course that many otherwise-demotivated kids might see the point in. Or even basic woodwork and DIY. I know someone's going to say it's the parents' job, but many parents never learnt this stuff! The split between what gets taught at school and what gets taught at home is always going to be pretty arbitrary and making schools teach what many parents clearly aren't seems like a good decision to me.

NotCitrus, you have nailed it there. I did learn this stuff at school, but I am perpetually horrified at the number of people who can't take up a hem nicely or cook a main meal without a major fuss.