Читать книгу A Spoonful of Sugar - Liz Fraser - Страница 52

Every day, we Brits throw away 220,000 loaves of bread, 1.6 million bananas, 5,500 chickens, 5.1 million potatoes, 660,000 eggs, 1.2 million sausages, 1.3 million yoghurts and 4.4 million apples.

Every year, we throw away over £10 billion of wasted food.

Daily food waste costs an average home more than £420 a year and for a family with children (that’s us then) this rises to £610. Madness! (stats from 2007)

But hold on a second: you don’t want to waste food, of course, but neither do you want to underfeed a child – they are growing and learning so fast, after all. We are bombarded with information about how important it is to make sure our kids get enough of this and enough of that in their diet lest they develop scurvy, diabetes, behavioural problems or a silly walk (OK, possibly not that one) and this has almost certainly led to us feeling the need to offer our kids gargantuan portions on their plates. Here: look at all these wonder-nutrients – eat, child, EAT!

Granny has little time for this, and argues her point in her usual clear, no-nonsense way:

‘Oh you hear so much about nutrition this and healthy diet that. But children are very clever, and they will eat as much or as little as they need or want on that day. Some days they want more, and other days they want very little. It’s the balance that’s important. Instead of worrying about what a child eats during the course of a day, think about what a child eats over a week. It usually all balances out.’