Monday 23 June 2008

Indoctrination, Indoctrination, Indoctrination….

One in three parents say their children know more about healthy eating campaigns than they do, a poll shows.

And most told the Department of Health survey that rising food prices put five portions of fruit and vegetables a day out of their reach.

The survey of 1,000 parents in England also revealed three-quarters of them were unaware that frozen and canned varieties counted towards the total. Food experts said school campaigns were improving children's knowledge.
So far so good, though you wish they’d have as much success teaching kids to read and write. But this line in the article betrays a worrying attitude:
School campaigns mean that many children are aware of what they can and cannot eat, but the surveyed suggests that many parents are not.

One mother, Debbie Hussey, told the survey that she had to be told by her daughter to swap baked potato for broccoli to reach the target.
I didn’t realise that some food was verboten in Brown’s Britain, or that we’d swapped the natural order of parents telling their children what to eat!
Azmina Govindji, from the British Dietetic Association, said that getting children involved in shopping or cooking made them more likely to eat healthier food.

She added: "If healthy eating messages can get through to children, then they have a lot of power in the home, and can ask their parents for the kind of food they need to be eating."
Yup, more power in the home. That’s what children need!

I used to regularly ask for the kind of food I felt I should be eating too, when I was six. Funnily enough, the answer was always ‘Shut up and eat the vegetables on your plate, or go hungry…’

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm sure that's how it was. Was there honey for tea too ?

TT

Anonymous said...

"Was there honey for tea too ?"

Yes, and jam!

I wonder if that'll be on the List of Government Mandated Foodstuffs for The Proletariat?

Anonymous said...

Do you object to junk food being marketed at young children, & them pressing their parents to buy them utterly worthless shite?

Anonymous said...

"Do you object to junk food being marketed at young children, & them pressing their parents to buy them utterly worthless shite?"

I expect them to be parents and to parent.

Not whine that little Johnny wants to eat crisps and only crisps and so they 'have to give in to him' - unless someone else makes the nasty crisp makers stop...

If they aren't prepared to do that, why have kids at all? Get a dog instead - at least that can't talk!

Longrider said...

If any child has the effrontery to tell me what I should or should not eat, they will receive a sharp reminder of the appropriate order of things - adults tell children what to do; not the other way around. And government propaganda is to be studiously ignored.

I eat what I damned well want to eat and I take no notice whatsoever of targets. All that, and I'm reasonably fit and healthy.

Anonymous said...

longrider

Your attitude is suspiciously grown-up even - horrors! - adult. Making your own decisions - tut tut we can't have that. You obviously require reprogramming - the next thing you know you'll be voting against the EU (if you're allowed to) or for somebody who doesn't believe in the AGW fraud.