Calorie Taxation

I hear what you are saying Flick but some people can, and do, take away the wrong message - especially from your last sentence.

You are correct that you can eat healthily and include the odd treat or food from your list. But that's not how it pans out in practise for the increasing numbers of the overweight and obese. They hear the message that nothing is forbidden and continue to munch their way through cakes, biscuits, fizzy drinks, etc.

The bit about it being the odd treat or eaten in moderation is being missed.

i started a thread on this subject yesterday and was quite surprised that some comments were quite disparraging that i was complaining about the use of condensed milk in so called low fat healthy ice lolly recipes on the BBC Good Food site.
From what i can see a lot of children eat a lot of processed food containing hidden sugar, salt and fat and i felt that if we are preparing things at home surely we can use a healthy option.

I only had cookery lessons at school for a year (then did Latin instead?!). The cookery lessons were hopeless, so they need to devise something better than the ones I had in the 1950s for today's generation of youngsters.

However, I learnt from my DM and from teaching myself from cookery books because I was interested in food. Perhaps a lot of people are just not interested in cooking and there is such a lot of ready food available these days whereas there wasn't much around when I was young so we had to cook.

All children should be taught basics of cookery and as young as possible so that it is fun. There is nothing difficult about making soup or a casserole. It is no good just saying well there parents dont do it.....it is time to stop the bad habits being carried on to a further generation. There is room for convenience foods in a balanced diet, and convenience doesnt mean junk. If I buy a ready cooked chicken, rip open a bag of prepared vegetables I have made a healthy albeit slightly more expensive version of a healthy meal. However, I often pop into Iceland on my way home as it has plenty of parking, I go there if I run out of bread, milk etc. It is horrifying to see the trolleys piled high with meal after meal for a family. Frozen chips, lasagne, burgers, pies, complete meals, curries, you name it, Iceland have it in a packet. Some people must have massive freezers! My son and daughter have always been good at taking a turn to cook at home, and now that my son is at Uni he prepares chilli, fajitas, pasta bakes etc, and DD is already planning on how she is going to cater for herself next year when she goes to Uni. Do you know they even sell frozen omelettes in Iceland? how hard is it to make an omelette for heavens sake?

I have to say that the school I went to did provide very good cookery classes - teaching both savoury and sweet. I was fortunate that my mother was a chef so most of my learning was done at home (sadly, I didn't inherit her talent or love of food preparation). I do think it would help enormously if cookery was taught at school from a young age (starting off with no-bake stuff and then progressing).

I used to take my group of Scouts (mainly boys) aged between 13 and 16 on camping trips where they would have to learn 'backwoods' cooking and they really did enjoy it - even baking a cake in a backwoods oven.

Food can be fun.

We moved to a different area halfway through my secondary education, so Imissed cookery in both places. The first school did not teach cookery and needleweork until the third year, and then half the year was needlework, the next half cookery. I left midway through the year.

At the school I went on to, it was needlework and cookery on alternate years up to fourth year. I joined third year in the middle of their needlework phase. After that you only got domestic subjects if you were clearly not cut out for anything at all academic.

It did not seem to stop me learning how to feed myself and DH when we were married, or making healthy meals for the children when they arrived..

You can even buy bubble and squeak, for crying out loud. My mother would turn in her grave! That was a way of using up leftover vegetables, yet people are paying good money to buy it ready prepared!

And why not? Delicious!

Who wants to cook cabbage and mash spuds if you don't have to.

(this comment can also be seen on the Oxbridge thread)

If you have cooked cabbage and spuds for a previous meal, you can have bubble and squeak free forthe next, without preparing anything. It is those who never cook veg who are happy to spend things like this, but say that it is too expensive to buy vegetables for their family!

(I did wonder why Oxbridge was getting the benefit of your opinions on cooking cabbage.)

Yes. I used to do that. Not anymore though. I would much rather let Mr Waitrose do the lot of it wherever possible.

But if you were on your beam ends, you could do it again, because you had learnt how to. If your childhood was all spent eating what Mr Waitrose had made for you, you would have no knowledge behind you of how make cheap food for yourself.

Elegran

If you have cooked cabbage and spuds for a previous meal, you can have bubble and squeak free forthe next, without preparing anything

My children used to love bubble & squeak and every Sunday, I would cook extra vegetables and make extra gravy to produce enough 'leftovers' (can deliberately cooked food be classed as leftovers?) for bubble & squeak the next day. Lovely stuff.

I learnt to cook because I couldn't at the age of 18. Little money and no convenience food to speak of except tins, boil in the bag and fish fingers. I started with pasta and an Italian cook book (paperback) and just continued to expand my cooking using cheap ingredients, along with searching for more exotic things - chillies and curries....I reckon if there had been loads of cheap readymade meals I may never have learned to cook.

My daughter and me agree that the less processed the food the better. She learned to cook a year after going to university and being fed up with pot noodles.

The point is that there is little incentive to learn to cook when there is such a variety of ready meals available, many of them being sold so cheaply. I'd vote for subsidising fresh food of all sorts, plus the basics and taxing readymade to bring the prices close together. Additionally, I would like to provide free cookery courses for people who can't cook to encourage them to learn.

Good post ayse.

I was reminded of when two friends and I, all aged 16, decided to take an evening cookery course because we did not do cookery at school. We were refused places on the grounds that the course was for 'married women'!

Well said, flickety. Both posts, on Thursday.

I cook because I like good food and much of the ready prepared stuff I've tried isn't a patch on my home cooking. A certain oomph is lacking, I find. I hate cooking but I like good food so I cook.

Can anyone remember what they did in Finland to resolve their desperately serious obesity problem? The traditional diet had become massively [sic] unhealthy in the modern world and I think that Finns were classed as having the highest proportion of obese people in the entire world. Somehow, they turned the whole thing round and widespread obesity is no longer a problem there. I think all this happened some time during the last ten years but I can't remember how the magic was worked but I'm pretty sure that their government was involved.

Yes, I remember Absent, not in any great detail, I'd have to look that up. But they started from a national consensus that something had to be done. So first step, get the population on board.

Finand and healthy nutrition

I remember visiting Helsinki years ago and being surprised at the number of Macdonald's in a very small area. The other thing I remember is that people bought bags of peas in their shells which they ate as snacks; we bought some which we ate with a beer or two - much healthier than crisps!