Jamie's Food Revolution

[snail1973]

I think I am a bit behind the times here, but I watched Jamie's Food Revolution (USA) last night, and was so shocked.

Those 6 year olds did not even know what a tomato was! What hope is there of getting them to eat 'real' food when they can't even identify the ingredients?

Do you think it is like that in parts of the UK too?

Absolutely. I was involved when the 'Fruit For Schools' project was launched. One of the motivators for it was that, in a survey, the average number of portions of fruit and veg the typical primary school aged child ate per week at the time was between 2 and 3. Per week. If you consider that many primary school age children will be eating 3, 4 or more portions per day then there are clearly thousands that get zero.

I think that, since the Jamie Oliver initiative, they've added healthy eating to the national curriculum, school dinner rules have sharpened up & many schools organising farm visits and setting up gardens. Plus the economic downturn means home-cooking has seen a bit of a resurgence. However, dietary habits are still very bad in a lot of areas.

I give Jamie my full support. But, sadly, I don't think it has really taken of in the schools. I enquired about our school's breakfast club. My children won't be going on account of what they are served:

"Breakfast is provided each day and comprises a selection of cereals, toast, juice, milk or water. Croissants, waffles, pancakes and muffins are offered regularly."

What kind of cereal?
Is there nurasweet in the jucie?
But the toast is crappy white bread.
croissants, waffles, pancakes, muffins... where is the nutrition on which these kids need to be fed to start the day???

And we are in a fairly priviledged West London area. God only knows what kind of crap they get in less priviledged areas.

It is a big problem if children can't recognise ordinary foods. We've got an enormous agricultural industry here for a start... if the customer base disappears (and there is evidence that it's happening already) because a generation is unfamiliar with tomatoes or broccoli (or what to do with a pork chop or a bag of lentils) then that has big implications on an important sector of the economy. The cost of treating diseases that are caused by poor or narrow diet is astronomical and getting worse.

The occasional turkey twizzler killed no-one, that's not the issue. But eating twizzlers for lunch with crap for breakfast and supper either side, every day, genuinely is a problem for the long-term.

I was so shocked a few years ago when I found out that some children (inner city I think) didn't know that milk comes from cows.

I think it is hugely important that everyone knows where their food comes from. Not recognising a tomato is part of the whole issue of this disconnection of urban and rural life which is so very unhealthy on so many levels.

PS I get extremely precious about turkey twizzlers and other shite processed food.

" poor or narrow diet has awful implications for health - but surely that is not because people are relying on processed foods, but rather because of eating disorders and food phobias - mental health issues rather than lack of familiarity with how to handle a pork chop or a bag of lentils."

There is increasing evidence that over-reliance on processed foods is at the heart of many medical problems. Eating disorders and phobias are a very tiny component by comparison. We fell in love with prepared foods starting around the 1950's. The cumulative effective of the ingredients that give processed food long shelf-lives, better colour, flavour etc., are just being appreciated and there are some serious concerns. Transfats (loved my manufacturers for being cheap and stable) are a notorious example of a processed food ingredient that proved to be far more dangerous than anyone realised. The nutrition value of anything that has endured the industrial food-manufacturing process is usually very low....even when it is re-fortified at the other end viz breakfast cereals.

By contrast, almost every study that comes out on how to cut the risk of diseases only really seen in Western Societies... such as Type II diabetes, many cancers, heart-disease, gall-bladder problems and so forth comes to the net conclusion 'eat more fruit and vegetables'... especially green vegetables.

So if children don't recognise broccoli, let alone eat it, then they are at an immediate disadvantage. And if they can't cook simple meals from cheap, fresh ingredients but rely on warming things up out of packets... they will not pass on good eating habits to their children either.

I was shocked at jamies programme when they revealed that they didnt enen give the children cutlery

ALoveBunch - I'm with you on that one, I couldn't believe the woman (Alice is it?) who wanted documentation to prove that primary age children can use a knife and fork!!

@AvrilHeytch.... I'm not the kind of MN poster that is going to attach multiple links to learned papers from XYZ University to support what I'm saying. However, I can recommend to anyone that they read Michael Pollan's lovely book 'In Defence of Food' which illustrates nicely some of the pitfalls of a 60 year love-affair with processed foods. One very common ingredient that I can illustrate the argument with, however, is salt. Implicated in the development of high blood-pressure and related illnesses. Recommended maximum intake for an adult is 6g a day which is about 1 tsp. Typical intake for someone with processed foods in their diet is 10g+.

Nutritional value of a food drops with time and treatment. To use your example, a freshly picked head of broccoli eaten raw is at its most nutritious. Steamed it is more nutritious than boiled. Fresh it is more nutritious than several days old. Picked Day 1, transported Day 2, cooked & put into a quiche Day 3, transported to a supermarket Day 4 given a 5 day 'best before' then reheated.... to give you the technical term 'it's fucked'.

precisely Avril, they don't need them for the food they are being brought up to think is normal.

All that brown/beige finger food dripping in sat fat, salt and sugar.

it is such a shame.

I can't understand how the lady who is in charge of what goes on the menu thinks this is normal food. she was on at the end of the programme and looked relatively healthy. I wonder if she would feed her kids all that sh1te

Again its the schools that in the wrong for not teaching the children that chips come from potatoes or how to use a knife and fork. Responisbility is taken away from parents at every turn. And then the parents were there when he showed them the fat and stated saying how bad it is, well why didnt they think it was bad before he rubbed their faces in it?

@AvrilHeytch... As I said before 'fresh it is more nutritious than several days old'. For the record, broccoli picked in the morning can be on the supermarket shelf the next morning these days. As for the article, if the idea that enjoying a good variety of fresh food with a bit of life left in it is cranky then count me in. :) I'm willing to be proved wrong.

Enjoy that quiche.

I think Chil's point about salt is a good one. One of the dangers with a lot of processed food is that people on the whole don't know how much salt, sat fat and sugar is in something, and if they do read the information, they don't understand it in the context of the other things they have eaten that day/week etc. The traffic light system that has been implemented by supermarkets has helped in some ways but hindered in others. I guess most people know that eating only foods that are red light for salt, fat and sugar, for every meal, is Bad For You, but I don't think it helps them distinguish between what you can have as an occasional treat and what you should really never eat as it barely qualifies as food. A lot of cheeses are red light for salt and fat, but cheese on wholemeal toast and a salad is a much more healthy and balanced meal than an enormous greasy meat feast pizza, and I think the traffic light system risks people thinking they are as bad as each other so might as well have the pizza.

And also even though most people might have heard of 5-a-day, there are huge swathes of people who don't bother to try and acheive that, and even those that do, might make a mess of portion sizes etc. If I make chicken for curry for DH and I, I know I have used one onion, one red or green pepper, a tin of chickpeas and half a tub of mushrooms between us, so I know we have 2 of our 5-a-day in that meal. You can't know that from most ready meals and lots of other processed foods.

Using the quiche example, the three mouthfuls of limp overcooked and not very fresh broccoli doesn't even qualify as a fraction of one of my 5-a-day, but a good two tablespoons full of steamed broccoli does, that's even if the quiche broccoli has the same nutritional content as the steamed (which I'm not convinced it does, as I'm not convinced that manufacturers always use the best freshest ingredients to make their processed foods).

Also, it's about context - you'd have to eat a lot of quiche (which is lovely but usually quite a lot of fat due to cheese and pastry) to get enough broccoli. A friend of mine said apparently tomato ketchup contributes to your 5-a-day. Well maybe, but it must throw your sugars and salts into the stratosphere.

This is IMVHO why processed foods are contributing to the declining health of the nation. They're not all evil per se, but they foster ignorance about what we are eating and thus make it much more difficult for people to make healthy lifestyle choices.

D

Jamie was in the news a year or two ago because he had said that the the only way to really teach children about nutrition and where food comes from is teach them to cook. Again, I totally support Jamie. I would very happy if the schools got kids cooking and stopped serving them crap to eat.

I will be happy when my children look at a plate of school dinner slop and say "euch.. what's it made out of".

I laugh at the school dinner tasting sessions because I don't want to know what it tastes like (my kids can be the judge of that) but I do want to know what is in it. I don't mind veg that has been frozen and reheated so much. But, I do mind when the fiber has been stripped out of the grains and nutrisweet added because it's cheaper than old fashioned sugar. I don't mind if my kids have chocolate after they eat their lunch. But, I do mind if the veg in the lunch has been picked out and left behind. Offering veg on the side to small children is bloody useless.

Sorry, meant to add, then posted my already incredibly long post anyway:

Avril the big if that you mention in your first post is IMO the big problem. Masses of people probably aren't getting the nutrients they need for health, and more worryingly, they probably don't know they're not.

Also, I disagree that a poor or narrow diet is more likely to be caused by eating disorders and food phobias than by general ignorance about food, healthy diet and cooking (in particular feeding a family on a budget).

FWIW, I don't think this argument is about the relative merits of fresh versus frozen veg, it's about people who don't have an veg, or think that McD's fries are veg 'cos it's potato innit' (not to mention the ketchup counting towards 5-a-day example).

It does matter that kids learn about healthy food - how are they ever going to ask for a banana if they don't know what one is?

D

I think the other worrying part about the children not recognising leeks or cabbages was the fundamental ignorance that represented. We'd expect a seven year-old to correctly identify an elephant, even if they'd never seen one in the flesh. Even if a child never eats veggies, they should be able to name the more common ones.

Given how many hours most people spend in supermarkets these days, usually with children in tow, and given that the produce section is usually pretty big and colourful, it's clear that if a child has got to the age of six or seven and still doesn't know what a tomato looks like 'Mum goes to Iceland'.