There are times when I look at Government announcements and wonder whether we have completely forgotten how we used to do things. The latest plans to tighten the rules around food served in schools are a perfect example. From September 2027, the Government intends to introduce much stricter School Food Standards, placing further restrictions on what can be served, how often certain foods can appear on menus and even how some foods should be prepared.
Before anyone accuses me of wanting children to live on chips, chocolate and fizzy drinks, let me be clear. Childhood obesity is a serious issue and of course I want children eating healthier food. Schools should provide nutritious meals and we should be doing everything sensible to encourage young people to live healthier lives. Where I disagree with the Government is on how we achieve that. I simply don’t believe the answer is another dose of the Nanny State, with Whitehall becoming increasingly involved in deciding exactly what can and cannot appear on a child’s dinner plate.
I’m old enough to remember when virtually every primary school seemed to have its own kitchen and its own cook. Perhaps I’m looking back with a little nostalgia, but school dinners were generally pretty straightforward. There was a menu for the week, there was variety and, importantly, the food was actually cooked. Meat, potatoes, vegetables, stews, pies, fish and the occasional pudding were all perfectly normal. The school cook knew what she was doing and nobody needed somebody sitting behind a desk in Whitehall deciding whether a particular meal could be served once a week, twice a week or only on special occasions.
The same was largely true at home. Those of us who grew up as Generation X, or before, will remember that eating out or ordering food in was a treat rather than an everyday occurrence. Most evenings somebody actually cooked. It didn’t have to be anything fancy and, in most households, it probably wasn’t. You peeled potatoes, chopped vegetables, cooked some meat, made some gravy and put everything on a plate. Children grew up seeing food being prepared and, even without realising it, learned some of the basics of cooking along the way.
I think that is something we have gradually lost. Today we can walk into a supermarket and buy almost anything imaginable, regardless of the season or where in the world it was produced. Food can travel thousands of miles before reaching our plates, while huge sections of our supermarkets are filled with highly processed convenience foods containing long lists of ingredients, preservatives, flavourings, stabilisers and additives. We have undoubtedly made eating more convenient, but I’m not convinced we have made ourselves healthier in the process.
That is why I think the Government is approaching this problem from the wrong direction. You cannot simply regulate your way into creating a healthy relationship with food, and you certainly cannot teach a child how to make sensible choices by telling their school how many grams of ketchup they are allowed with their dinner. If we are genuinely serious about improving children’s diets, perhaps we need to stop making things increasingly complicated and instead go back to basics. We need to Get Britain Cooking Again.
I would much rather see investment going into proper school kitchens, skilled cooks and good quality ingredients than creating increasingly complicated rules governing individual foods. Give schools the ability to prepare straightforward, nutritious meals from scratch and give the people working in those kitchens the freedom to create balanced and varied menus. A freshly cooked meal made from good ingredients is surely a better starting point than a highly processed meal that happens to comply with a lengthy Government rulebook.
While we are doing that, why not make much better use of British produce? We have some of the finest farmers and food producers anywhere in the world. British beef, lamb, pork, poultry, dairy products, potatoes, carrots, peas, apples and countless other products are grown and produced here to incredibly high standards. Yet too often we seem obsessed with importing food from the other side of the world when perfectly good alternatives are being produced here at home.
I would like to see schools encouraged to buy British and, wherever practical, buy local. Imagine the difference if more of the money we spend feeding our children also supported British farmers, British food producers and local supply chains. That would not only help provide good quality food, it would support our rural economy, strengthen our food security and reconnect children with where their food actually comes from. There is something slightly absurd about talking endlessly about sustainability while flying and shipping food thousands of miles around the world when we can grow so much of it ourselves.
There is another part of this that I think is even more important, and that is teaching children how to cook. Cooking is one of the most useful life skills anyone can have, yet somewhere along the way we have allowed it to become almost optional. Every young person should leave school knowing how to prepare a handful of basic, healthy and affordable meals. Not because Government should dictate what they eat when they become adults, but precisely for the opposite reason. Give people the knowledge and skills they need and allow them to make sensible choices for themselves.
Teaching a child how to prepare vegetables, cook meat safely, make a basic sauce, understand portion sizes, use leftovers and turn a few simple ingredients into a meal gives them something they can use for the rest of their life. It can save them money, make them healthier and give them greater independence. To me, that is far more powerful than simply adding another food to a list of things that schools are told to restrict.
We also need a bit of common sense about balance. There was pudding when I was at school. There were chips occasionally, there were cakes and there were treats, and the world didn’t end. A healthy diet should not mean pretending that children can never enjoy something sweet or occasionally have fish and chips. It means understanding that those things are part of a balanced diet rather than the whole diet. That is where education, moderation and personal responsibility matter far more than another regulation.
Of course Government has a role. It should make sure standards are high, ensure children have access to nutritious meals and make sure parents have good information. But Government also needs to know when to stop. There is a difference between setting sensible standards and trying to micromanage every plate of food served in every school in the country.
Sometimes we make things unnecessarily complicated when the answer is staring us in the face. We need fresh ingredients, simple and varied menus, proper school kitchens, skilled cooks, more British produce and children who actually know how to turn ingredients into a meal. Perhaps that sounds a little old fashioned, but I’m perfectly comfortable with that. Sometimes looking back at what worked in the past can help us understand where we have gone wrong today.
Rather than another layer of Whitehall rules telling schools what they cannot cook, let’s give them the tools, people and ingredients to cook good food in the first place. Rather than lecturing the next generation about food, let’s give them the skills to understand it. Rather than relying so heavily on food and produce travelling halfway around the world, let’s put more British produce on British plates.
And rather than trying to ban our way to a healthier country, perhaps it is time we rediscovered something generations before us simply took for granted: the ability to cook a decent meal from scratch.
Forget more Nanny State rules. Let’s Get Britain Cooking Again.
