"We shy away from telling parents they are failing their children by not giving them proper nutrition, writes Emer O'Kelly
A LITTLE boy hadn't known carrots and potatoes came out of the ground. Other little boys were each given a pea pod and then shown how to open it to get at the peas. They hadn't realised that peas came in pods rather than singly; or for that matter where they came from in the first place.
A grown-up had no idea that mayonnaise, the 'mayo' that she dolloped over every burger and sandwich, was made with eggs. It's called 'food poverty'. It should also be called 'food ignorance'.
But it's nothing to do with class, which bluntly is what we mean when we talk about 'education'. There are probably damn near as many gym-using, manicured stay-at-home mums who haven't a clue about nutrition as defeated single mums on deprived housing estates who think the specks of tomato in a mass-produced pizza count as healthy vegetables.
The children quoted above were all inhabitants of the O'Malley Park area of Limerick, not known as the most salubrious or privileged of districts. They were reacting to their experiences of taking part in the South Hill Area Centre's Food Initiative, one of three around the country, where youngsters are given access to growing their own food. Their parents, who took part in this experiment, haven't had much chance in life, and the children, unless something changes, are set fair to repeat the pattern of the previous generation.
The grown woman, on the other hand, is a middleclass American: a high-flying accountant earning a lot of money, and living with all mod cons including a swimming pool. She has one thing in common with the kids in South Hill (and indeed with their parents): they are all products of generations of thinking that progress means moving away from domesticity.
Everyone is too busy/too tired/too lazy/too bored/too stupid/too brainy to realise that there is nothing degrading about taking an interest in food and learning to prepare it. So we've spiralled down to the situation pointed out last week on RTE's Ear to the Ground: that it's 10 times easier for people to get their daily calorie requirement from convenience and pre-packaged food than it is from real food. That was pointed out on the programme by Sinead Keenan, the co-ordinator of 'Healthy Food for All'.
And of course it's not rocket science: but for a lot of people what does seem to be close to rocket science is the realisation that calories don't mean health: they're energy units, not units of nutrition. Eat a pizza, and depending on size, you'll have taken on board something near your entire daily recommended calorie allowance. But you won't have taken on board the nutrition you need: particularly for children with their extra requirements of nutrients to aid healthy growth. And in Italy, home of the pizza, nobody would dream of eating a pizza without the accompaniment of a huge salad, probably followed by a piece of fruit. 'Afters' in Ireland usually constitute some kind of mush or bar constituted from E numbers, sugar, colourings, and maybe a bit of sawdust. (I exaggerate: but not all that much.) In France, school lunches provided by the state as a result of high taxes are constituted from things like raw vegetables with dips, accompanied by real soup which has never seen the smell of a package. The children don't say 'Yuck' because that's what they've been eating since they were weaned. In other words, they have tastebuds.
Ally that to a statement made a couple of weeks ago by RTE's Damien O'Reilly on Radio One's CountryWide. He was interviewing a potato grower, and together they were lamenting the state of the potato industry. 'Why,' he asked his interviewee, 'do so many people avoid the spud because they think it's fattening? I mean, there's not an ounce of fat in the potato.' It's highly unlikely that Damien O'Reilly, a highly qualified agriculturalist, doesn't know the difference between fat and fattening. Potatoes are fattening: they're fattening because they have a high calorific content, not a high fat content. That's the difference. And if the only vegetable your children will eat is potatoes, and those in the form of chips, you're well on the way to a nice bedrock for heart disease, obesity, and low energy levels.
The various people interviewed by Ella McSweeney for the Ear to the Ground item, from the gardener Barbara Mulcahy whose enthusiasm for what she was helping the children to grow was infectious, through the various nutrition specialists helping to promote the three national food initiatives, also seemed to me to present a confused message. Sinead Keenan said we need a government policy on healthy food. No argument there. But, she said, it was cheaper and easier to eat unhealthily. Easier, maybe, but not cheaper, provided you have access to the makings of real food. As Anne Lawlor, a South Hill mother of five, and a supporter of the healthy food initiative, pointed out, it's all about availability. And around South Hill, apparently, there's one large supermarket, and a few other shops. There are vegetables aplenty in the supermarket, but if you haven't got a car, you're stymied.
Even in the large supermarket, Anne Lawlor said, all the deals were on the frozen food and chocolate. You don't get two for one on a bunch of bananas, she said ruefully.
Should we blame the supermarkets for that? I don't think so. It's not their job to educate their customers. They're there to answer demand. And if people want two-for-one on pizzas made from fatty ingredients, that's what they'll get.
What they need, said Jennifer O'Brien of the South Hill Area Centre, is access to the right kind of food on their doorsteps in order to tackle the estimated national figure that 15 per cent of people are living in some kind of food poverty. That's being achieved in South Hill, but only on a tiny scale. And there are only two other such projects around the country.
Two things are wrong: we're still trying to educate people at all levels of intellectual achievement to despise the simple skills of living. And we're refusing to tell mothers if or when they're failing their children. Try to get an expert to admit that, and watch them squirm. It's always about the blame game belonging somewhere 'up there' 'corporately'. Or some other such term. And I happen to have enough faith in the mothers of Ireland, of all classes and levels of education, to think that if someone starts talking tough to them and telling them where they're failing their children, they'll respond: they'll demand skills, and they'll demand access to what allows them to exercise those skills: real ingredients. They'll probably even enjoy it."
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/emer-okelly-foodignorant-mothers-need-a-healthy-dose-of-reality-3010253.html
tags:
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