... to feel annoyed when professionals get the blame?

When we went there we used to stay in vegetarian guest houses, which were usually run by English people. One we stayed at in Normandy, I think, had a foie gras farm next to it. It did so well that the owners bought the farm and freed the geese.
I was looking through all the photos yesterday because my 11 year old grandson needed some French photos for the cover of his French book. Most of the photos of places to eat were creperies. Galettes are very nice. In fact when we had a guest house in York, I used to cook buckwheat pancakes for breakfast.
We once stayed at a farm in Brittany and had a very good conversation with the farmer and his wife about vegetarianism, helped by their teenage daughter and a dictionary.

France is not an easy place for vegetarians. You might get offered a cheese omelette if you are lucky.

This was 1979 or 1980, so it did not look as ornate as many of those even though it was a very posh restaurant. Ken and I both studied A level French, but somehow Baked Alaska did not appear in our vocabulary.

www.google.co.uk/search?q=omelette+norvegienne+recette&client=mobilesearchapp&hl=en&v=3.0.2.20993&source=mobilesearchapp&channel=iss&rlz=1MDAPLB_enGB525GB525&qscrl=1&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=Hi0yUvLIHeHC7Aa35ICgBQ&ved=0CDAQsAQ&biw=1024&bih=686&dpr=1
Love that story Jen- never knew that and thought I was pretty good at French!

When my kids were at school doing French exchanges, we went to Sancerre with the boy they exchanged with.
We remember it very well, because the mayor was a good friend of the boy's mother, and told Thierry to take us to a restaurant at lunch time. All three boys ordered their food, but, being vegetarian, we ordered the only thing we could see on the menu that we thought we could eat, an omelette Norwegienne. The other food arrived but not the omelette.
We asked if we could have it and were looked at incredulously. What, at the same time? We said yes, so they brought the trolley across, and flambed a baked alaska for us!
We also drank a lot of Sancerre wine. I still do on occasions, such as when it's reduced. I do not like the full price.

Thatbags, you must get to know. It's a wine from the upper Loire, drunk young, it's dry and light and perfect with shrimps or oysters. Its middle is hard to describe but slatiness or gun flint comes close, however it's more fruity and harmonious than that of the neighbouring better known Pouilly Fumé.

I'm not familiar with Sancerre. Sauvignon Blanc is usually my choice. What kind of 'middle' does Sancerre have, mice? I'm using middle in the sense Malcolm Gluck used it in... oh, the early nineties?... in his Guardian wine column when he said that a Spanish white, Torres 'Esmeralda' had "a banana-like middle." I hadn't been a wine drinker up till then, but I thought that description was so silly that I had to try the wine (and confirm my judgment). The thing is, though, he was right! So I followed his column for a while and treid wines he recommended. It was my early wine-tasting education.

You can describe the edges if you prefer

Sauvignons have a gooseberry edge, some more than others. It was my liking for smoked mackerel that made me appreciate it first. Unfortunately smoked mackerel is one of the very few things (I can't think of anything else actually) that gives me indigestion. But I still like Sauvignon Blanc.

As many glasses as you like, Micelf - I always have a 'chef's privilege' when cooking.

Well now, I can cook. Very well. But I shall need my glass of Sancerre and I shall insist that the expeditionary force returns with a good supply of mountain herbs.

I do find the idea rather attractive but I am not the world's best cook. Any volunteers for the catering? And we can put the 'guests' in tents but I will stay in my comfortable flat! I have the perfect 'yomp' in mind - 1,000 feet up a very, very steep path. Lovely views, but they will be too exhausted to notice them. And I will be firm but fair and I won't ask them to do anything I can't do myself. Definitely an idea for a new career!

greatnan, you have a new career ahead of you running a boot camp for obese youngsters and their parents

I have no idea. Limited reading or lack of acquaintance with the dictionary perhaps

Oh. Why does it always bring witches to mind for me?

In case you didn't know, it's a big cooking pot used by wise women down the ages to cook healthy and nutritious meals for the group they were nurturing.

"cauldron"?

Yes Micelf, great image - I wonder if we could get Jamie Oliver on side.....

I've been chuckling since I read this at the mental picture of Greatnan leading her boot camp up the mountains followed by, or, more probably, pushing the recalcitrant and obese conscripts up those slopes. Followed by a vegetable chopping session round a large cauldron

Obviously depends on the professional you are talking about.
I recall a thread when the architect was blamed for a building causing a melted car. The architect said that he had warned that that might happen, but the client thought he knew better and left off baffles which would have solved the problem.
I suppose we could blame architects here for designing houses with kitchens.

I read this and yes,why blame the professionals. Health visitors are thinly spread and in areas of high deprivation seem to focus on babies/toddlers considered to be at high risk of health problems or where their are safeguarding issues. You rarely see one of those poor obese children, without noticing their mother and/or father are also hugely overweight. How about arranging for them to stay at Greatnan's boot camp, and yomp around those mountains to lose some weight and eat well. Oh yes the problem is Gn would be too direct.....

Might as well criticise the schools for not teaching young people about how to eat healthily. or the politicians in successive governments who have sidelined parenting and cooking in the national curriculum.

I can remember hearing people saying to youngsters who were misbehaving in public 'Is that what they teach you at school?' I wanted to say 'No, we try to teach them good behaviour, but they spend a lot more time at home'.

Eloethan I take your point, particularly about the food manufacturers -often the information supplied is opaque, to say the least.
To be fair, I have only the Telegraph's report to go on - I looked for the original article online but couldn't find it.
But it was the logic, or lack of it that offended me. Health visitors do not cause obesity in children. In most cases, it is caused by eating too mujch and exercising too little. In rare cases there may be a hormonal cause.
Health visitors being frightened of the parents they are supposed to be supporting may be a contributory factor, but it is not a direct cause.
It also leads to the wider question of how much responsibility the State should take, through its employees, for citizen's health, education and well-being.
While very few people would advocate a return to the pre-Welfare State days, I can't help feeling that the professionals in some cases are being expected to shoulder the burdens that people should perhaps be carrying themselves.

But surely it's a health visitor's (and other health professionals') job to monitor and advise on health, and if a child's health is noticeably suffering because it is underweight/overweight/suffering from gastric problems, etc., shouldn't the parents be made aware of this? Perhaps they do give advice but it is ignored. If that's the case, then the parents are to blame.

I would suggest, though, that food manufacturers and their misleading advertisements are at least partly to blame for poor nutrition in this country.

I tried to say that on the Daniel Pelka thread and got fairly short shrift. It is easy to target the people around a situation but parents have responsibility to care for and bring up their children to be happy, safe and responsible young people.. Social workers come into the picture when parents are not carrying out their responsibilities well enough. teachers are there to educate children, doctors are there to help when children are ill or hurt etc etc.

If a child is overweight, roaming about unsupervised, behaves badly, drops litter etc etc this is not the fault of medical practitioners, social workers, teachers!