Jenny’s stories of the cookery classrooms of 1970s London tell us so much
about Britain, the British and the foodscape that we’ve created in the mid
2020s. Her hilarious tales of recalcitrant teen cooks and crazily outmoded
exam questions pull focus on just how out of synch we were even then with
the role of food in the health, wealth and well-being of the next generation of
parents, leaders and role models. While Italian kids, Spanish, French and just
about every child in the world were cooking and eating delicious local,
seasonal, sumptuously familiar meals with their families every day, Britain was
gorging itself on a new diet of shiny supermarket foods. Nutrition fell at the
first hurdle in this trolley race down these dazzling new aisles piled high with
processed products and just-add water desserts.
And here we are 50 years on, with obesity the main cause of cancers,
Parkinsons, Alzheimers, arthritis, heart disease and Type 2 Diabetes.
Supermarkets have eaten our simple but hearty national diet and spat out a
junk food culture that lines their purses, ruined our gut health and pulled the
rug from beneath an increasingly wobbly NHS.
The Government finally accepts, after years of campaigning by charities like
The Food Foundation, that food poverty and poor diet is a primary cause of the
2.8 million people currently out of work creating what Henry Dimbleby calls a
‘massive drag on the economy’.
Now, thanks to Dimbleby and other food writers and campaigners, the
conversation is changing. Chris Van Tulleken has put ultra-processed food on
the map and transformed the public dialogue about the power of the
multinational food industry in creating addicts out of the most vulnerable. As
kids grow up with new Government policy limiting the bombarding of ads for
junk food on television before 9pm, and paid online advertisements for foods
high in fat, sugar or salt from January 2026, it feels like there’s a real
movement building for change.
But this top-down approach to transforming our relationship with food could
be like just about every other Government policy over the years – remember
what Jamie Oliver did with school dinners in the mid 2000s? As new
governments send in the janitors to sweep up the debris of the previous lot,
those shiny scraps of hope could well be emptied into the political swing bin to
make way for a new era of in-fighting and back-handers.
Which is why food education in school is an essential building block in a new
food system. Exciting initiatives in school and after school, as well as holiday
cookery clubs like those at Made in Hackney and Chefs in Schools teach kids
just how much fun cooking can be, using fire pits and butchery skills for the
kind of hands-on experiences that will shape their attitudes to food for the
rest of their lives. Sarah Bentley at MIH says that growing their own food
fosters “a respectful approach to nature, to resources, to the soil, to the land,
to worms, to bees. It connects it all up. The teachers say to me, ‘oh, Sarah, so
many of the SEN kids behave for you like they don’t behave in the classroom.’
And I say, ‘Well, they’re outside. They’re happy. They’re doing something
practical.’”
Gilly Smith is a food journalist and podcaster who has been campaigning for a
food culture which nourishes people and planet for over 30 years. Her award-
winning weekly podcast, Cooking the Books, explores life through the prism of
food. She also produces The Food Foundation Podcast which tackles the
growing challenges facing the UK’s food system.
itaughtthemtocook.com 