The chief function of mandatory education should be to equip a child with the necessary tools to achieve their full potential in adulthood. But food, cooking, and nutrition barely feature in any national curriculum.
This absolutely blows my mind. I can think of no other skill or knowledge base that we need to rely on as much or as often as what we should be using to fuel our lives. Eating is something we sll have in common, no matter where we are from, and we do it multiple times every day for the rest of our lives. A failure to equip a child with these necessary skills is, to me, one of the greatest failures of public policy of the modern age.
Our food preferences and habits are formed early on. Childhood brains and palates are malleable and hungry for knowledge. New experiences happen to us every day and we gradually make sense of the world, and our place in it, through trial and error. But we are driven, largely, by the desires of the most primitive parts of the brain – which are essential for survival.
Evolution has equipped us with an inbuilt desire for calorically dense foods high in sugar and fat. Historically, these foods could fuel us for a long time and are easily digestible to turn into useful energy, but were rare and required hard work to acquire. Now we are surrounded by them. We are locked in a battle against evolutionary preferences, and the manufacturers of ultra-processed foods know exactly how to pander to our most base desires.
The balancing act
Government-mandated food policy is a thorny issue – it touches on significant issues of personal freedom and the extent to which the state can, or should, intervene in what we use to fuel us. But the fact that we are not equipping the youngest members of society with the tools to fight back against this increasingly significant public health issue is nothing short of negligence of the highest order. Food policy is a public health issue of the utmost importance. Countries that spend more on food and nutrition education (including the provision of healthy, nutritionally balanced and sustainably sourced free school meals) suffer far lower rates of obesity in children. In a high-income nation it costs roughly $1,300 per child per annum to feed them a state-subsidized hot meal at lunch time. Detractors may balk at this seemingly high cost but the ROI is estimated at between 1.3 and 1.7 times thanks to lower healthcare costs and higher earnings potential over a lifetime.
It’s a small price to pay. Furthermore, many of the behavioral issues we are seeing more of in the classroom have been directly attributed to poor diet or malnutrition. A frightening number of children are, quite simply, too hungry to learn. The science on poor diet and the rise of ultra-processed foods suggests that they could create problems as significant or worse than those caused by smoking. It would be criminal if it took the same length of time before something was done about it.
That fightback has to begin now. It has to be at the forefront of government policy and it has to begin in schools.
The Secret Chef
Read The Secret Chef’s last column here.
