Feed yourself on £1 a day

[oldherbaceous]

Dear Alison, my suggestion would be to make you Health Secretary.
Dear Primrose, when you said the kids are eating cheap and nasty unhealthy products, i take it you didn't mean cheap as in the price, because those junk meals would cost a lot more than a healthy meal.

One more thing i must mention, i went to a Christmas Concert at a local Primary School today, it's a small village school with about seventy pupils.
And there was not one over-weight child there, and whats more they have had some of the best OFSTED reports in Bedfordshire since they started them.

[richard p]

funny thing is the oh is a governor at the local infants school, went to a meeting yesterday where the ht proposed a healthy eating week early next year,( aparently it will earn points with ofstead) upshot is the oh has arranged a series of 5 hour long talks for parents govering things like proper breakfasts, lunchboxes, she is even getting a collegue to do one on indian head massage with oils to counter headlice.
on the other hand the local primary school has told the children it is considering banning everything except fruit and carrot sticks during break time, when we asked the ht what he was playing at he said dont worry parents will be "consulted" before we impose it.
the sad thing is both ht's will have a hard job convincing parents that they know much about healthy eating.

[Jenny Green]

I think the problem lies with our heavily consumerist society. Most people are obsessed with acquisitions and are led to believe by advertising that having more things will make them happy. Therefore the majority of their money is spent on things rather than food. Our neighbours have a beautiful house but their children seem to live on sweets and toast. The mum was wondering why all three had ended up with broken collar bones within a year or two of each other!
No one seems to believe that you are what you eat any more, so they aren't interested in good food, only food that's quick to prepare and either salty or sweet. There also seems to be some evidence that eating junk food makes your appetite increase, thus contributing to obesity rates.

[Allan]

Jenny,Generally I have to agree with you but there is a very significant number of people who are persuaded the other way. The trouble is that there is not enough really healthy food to go round and those with the power to do something about it are missing the target. We get a lot of effort trying to persuade us to let an organisation promote our business but not a penny on practical help where it is needed i.e. in producing the stuff. There was a local co-op set up, customers were supposed to collect the cheap, maily Organic, produce, they spent a lot of public money having a logo designed, come the winter the scheme collapsed.
You may have caught the news that the Soil Association has been given the task of making school dinners more healthy. It has been agreed that it cannot be all Organic on grounds of price and availability so a consuiderable proportion will have to be just 'local'
p.s. I note that you are no longer signing as O****** F****. It's better really.

[Alison]

I agree with you that the demand and supply of organic food is pretty patchy - it is amazing how much we import when it should be available here.
But for the majority of people with unhealthy ways of eating, surely it isn't the lack of organic food that is the problem - it is the fact that they don't cook fresh from basics. There seem to be so many people who don't know how to tackle a raw swede, or a beetroot, or who are not willing to 'get their hands dirty' to clean a leek or wash a potato.
Of course I do use convenience meals occasionally, and they are handy, but some families seem to live on nothing else, preferring to have everything already cooked and ready to microwave. Even the most non-organic fresh veg is healthier than a non-stop diet of that!
Alison

[Piglet]

A neighbour of ours has an organic box delivered in an attempt to eat healthily. I must say that I have composted better than they had delivered.

We eat ready meals most work days but they are ready meals with a difference. I will for example make batches of pies, stews, curries, soups, portions of different veggies, herbed mash etc. It takes a few minutes in the oven or microwave to be eating a homemade dinner with minimum fuss.

To be honest, many quick meals can be made in minutes with fresh ingredients but many people live in ignorance of how easy it is to cook or even how cheap fresh food actually is compared to frozen "ding" dinners.

I find it amusing to go to a party and the host moans how much effort it was to take the snacks out of boxes and microwave them and how hard they had worked.

[submariner]

What I do not understand are folk. Doing our shopping yesterday, I was buying fruit. There were lovely British Cox and Gala apples as well as Coference and Comice pears, and yet people were buying apples from all over the world. I made a comment to one lady, about them being British, and had only come a short distance, whereas the foreign apples and pears had come thousands of miles, and lost most of their goodness. The same goes for vegetables. Her answer was that she hadn't thought about it. She was conditioned by the television, meethinks. Some education is needed.