Читать книгу A Spoonful of Sugar - Liz Fraser - Страница 48

We spend around £2 billion a year on ready meals.

In 2006 Britons spent more than £52 billion on food – with more than ninety per cent of that money going on processed food. Ugh.

In 2007 we spent £39 billion on fast food in Europe’s top ten outlets.

Home cooking is cheaper, healthier (you control the amount of fat, salt etc) and you even get some exercise preparing the meal and cleaning up!

Cooking can relieve stress and it’s satisfying (assuming you don’t burn it all like I often do).

“The evidence is now undeniable that poor nutrition is putting children’s physical health at risk. Many children are now expected to die before their parents – as a direct result of their unhealthy diets and lifestyles. Many children’s diets are high in sugar, refined starches and the wrong kinds of fats, as well as artificial additives. They are high in calories (energy), but lacking in essential nutrients. The risks to physical health of such a ‘junk food’ diet are now recognized, [and ] the effects of food on behaviour are… very real.”

Dr Alex Richardson author of They Are What You Feed Them

Fewer and fewer of us spend time cooking in the kitchen with our children, which is sad enough from a bonding and life-skills point of view – children learn not only how to look after themselves, but also how to count, measure, weigh, and look suitably irritated when it all goes wrong – but what makes it even worse is that it’s been shown that when kids help prepare a meal, they are much more likely to actually eat it. It’s a complete no-brainer in other words!

And just look at what all of this ready-meal culture has done to our kids’ education: In a study in 2007, eleven per cent of eight year olds didn’t know that pork chops come from pigs, eighteen per cent had no idea where yoghurt comes from (it’s from bats’ teardrops, obviously…) and eight per cent of children growing up in cities didn’t know that beef burgers come from cows. And when you realise that two per cent of children think that eggs come from cows, and that bacon is from cows or sheep, you really are left wondering: do they even know what food IS?!

The facts above are not so much surprising (and, let’s admit it, more than a little funny) as brow-wrinklingly depressing. When more children think honey comes from Tesco’s than know how to crack an egg, you know something’s gone seriously wrong not only with their education, but with their home life. I’m not suggesting we should all keep our own bees and hens, of course, but when you cook with a child, even using shop-bought basics as most of us do, you can have those lovely little conversations where matters such as bee keeping, pollination, and Great, Great Aunt Muriel’s perfect method of egg beating crop up, and where such knowledge is passed on to the next generation. And if time for cooking (or the lack of it) is a big issue for you then try this one for starters: go without the television and computer games for a week. Seriously, try it. If you don’t find at least an extra hour in your week to cook together, I’ll eat my hat (and it’s a nice one).