Schoold dinners

While I made the transition from student to gainfully employed a
little while ago, there are still moments in the calendar that deliver
a jolt of nostalgia for the days of homework and timetables and
rattling tin pencil cases. Christmas is such time, where what used to
be a two week mid-winter expanse of of holidays contracts to three or
four days of frenzied revelry and a bloated, woozy return to work
before year's end. The fresh bright sunshine of late May exam weather
is another. As every college campus evolves into a bijoux hedgeschool,
us latte labourers crank up the air-conditioner and undo our ties just
a fraction more.

September protrudes from memory most prominently, noteworthy for me as
it tended to mark a dramatic shift in diet. Gone were the lazy days of
summer grazing, of late breakfasts, lingering lunches, spontaneous
ice-cream runs and of revenous midnight snacking. In its place, food
became regimented, slotted into the day's schedule as fuel for
activitiy, rather than being the activity itself.

In retrospect, my school diet was at times diabetes-inducingly
appalling. But I ran around a bit, and I ate dinner at home, would
even cook myself by times, and there was often as not something green,
something starchy, and some protein on the plate; balancing my diet
between pizza and porridge, between ketchup and coriander.

Yet in the intervening years something of a critical mass appears to
have been reached. A whole sociology has emerged around the
balkanisation of the family meal, the industrialisation of food
production and the socio-economic fissures that increasingly define
what is on our plate as much as what is in our pocket; publicised and
politicised by the likes of Jamie Oliver. The problem of poor diet,
especially among the young, is by now a well established, even
laboured discourse, yet the facts bear repeating.

Obesity is considered to be at epidemic proportions across the island
of Ireland and continues to increase year on year. 1 in 5 children in
the 5-12 year age bracket are estimated to be overweight with half of
these obese. This leads to numerous poor health outcomes with, for
instance, a gain in weight of only a stone doubling a person's chances
of developing type 2 diabetes. Obesity is thought to cost the
exchequer €4 billion annually in morbidity related costs. All of this
has led to loud cries from the 'something must be done' brigade.

The default response, it would appear, is to turn to the schools. As
they throw open their doors once again this September, healthy eating
will be promoted through a smorgasbord of curricular initiatives and
resource packs beloved of the public health campaigners. One example
is the new subject, Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE),
taught now in our secondary schools and soon to be upgraded to a full
Leaving Cert subject, where healthy eating will be taught alongside so
many other 'life skills' in what has beomce a curricular dumping
ground for society's ills.

So can we all rest easy as the little tykes go back to school to learn
the difference between a carrot and a Crunchie? Well, not quite.

One problem is that the link between knowledge and health-behaviour is
ambiguous at best. This is well illustrated by an all-island study of
self-reported knowledge of healthy eating and actual eating habits
among Irish adolescents carried out by Safefood. The study found
knowledge of food nutrition and healthy eating practices were not
straightforwardly linked. Moreover, there was even some evidence to
show that information campaigns focusing on nutrition and obesity can
result in girls in particular filtering information to focus on
calorie content rather than nutritional value, which can actually lead
to very unbalanced eating habits.

Of course these are not pedagogical revelations. Lessons from sex
education should have taught us long ago that a frigid approach was
doomed from the outset. Just as the detailed knowledge of
contraceptive practice is so consumately overcome by hormonal revery,
so too the instant gratification and sugar induced arcadia of the fast
food hit will trump the squat earnestness of the food pyramid when the
progeny are peckish.

The education that is needed is not one of nutrition and health
warnings. This reduces food to chemistry, to biology, to life science.
It presents food without a cultural or emotional aspect. It misses the
fact that wheatgerm will never be a comfort food. If all we teach
about food is the granular facts of vitamins, calorie content and
RDAs, it's hard to get excited, it's hard to care. We loose sight of
its higher functions; the cooking, the the presentation, the social
practices that only we as humans bring to food. It will be by
exploring these latter elements with young people where our latter-day
battle of the bulge can be won.

Needless to say such an approach is unlikely to emerge from our
present education system, itself a pathetically malnourished waif. But
nor should it. Social poliy and education can help, but the fact is
that children's eating habits tend to follow that of their parents.
Parental repsonsibility seems an outmoded and pat solution to many
social issues but its influence in this instance is uncontestable.
It's an equation as robust as any theorum taught in maths. Fat mammy +
fat daddy = fat kid. Perhaps then, as with cooking, we need to stop
outsourcing the blame and the first lessons to be learned, are a
little closer to home.