My fond family members might - just occasionally - call me bossy, but even I would not start laying down the law about other people's lunch boxes. The idea that anyone outside the home should stipulate what a child has in his or her lunch box seems to cry out "police state" - and yet that is what our government would like schools to do. Mother does not know best.
Control over our food, the rules or guidelines to which we should all be adhering, grow literally by the day. It is difficult to hear a news bulletin without food featuring. In a world still torn apart by man's inhumanity to man, our news headlines choose to disregard torture and injustice and wax indignant instead about the amount of fat we dare consume.
Food "facts" are science at its worst. Supposed scientific research is shot through and through with commercial interests - one reason why the information is constantly changing.
The absurdity of it all was brought home forcibly last week when I heard an interview on the radio with a researcher whose statistics showed women who drank coffee increased their risk of a miscarriage by some horrendous figure.
The weary interviewer said: "Everything seems bad for us. Is there anything we can eat or drink that's OK?"
"Of course," simpered the researcher. "There's water and . . ." long pause "freshly pressed vegetable juice - in moderation".
Apparently children are obese. Not just cuddly or showing that pre-grown-up puppy fat that children have always had before the curves of adulthood develop but obese.
As usual, schools must provide the sticking plaster for society's alleged deficiencies. Cookery lessons are to be reintroduced for all. I like that. Nothing would please me more than to be presented with a sumptuous three-course meal every night by a youthful relative. But whether or not this can be achieved in the government's proposed eight one-hour lessons is more controversial.
There appears to be a lack of certainty about the initiative. The public is being asked what they would like the little ones to learn in these lessons. Sally Huxley, an experienced teacher in this area, who, like me, has lived through the school timetable metamorphosis from cookery, to home economics, to food technology and food science says: "We don't regard 'the public' as an authority on what to teach in history, physics or French lessons so I see no reason why they should set the curriculum for food."
Confidence might be higher if children arrived at school, shunted there by members of 'the public', with much idea about anything culinary. Sally Huxley notes that children are arriving at secondary school with no idea how to break an egg, never mind beat one, can't recognise a tea towel or potato peeler and have never used an oven or tin opener, so protective is this generation of parents. Such a public seems peculiarly ill equipped to advise professional specialist teachers about the curriculum.
In any case, the thinking behind the cookery in schools initiative to tackle obesity is against all common sense. Is it true that good cooks are all thin? Of course not.
We are programmed to enjoy food where we can. Our primeval ancestors learned that sweet things were less likely to be poisonous than bitter ones. I read a recent newspaper article devoted to bringing to our attention to the fact that a hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows is considerably more calorie-filled than a glass of water. I simply do not believe there are people in this country who don't know that.
Re-education won't make any difference because the hot chocolate is deliciously satisfying. And in a mature society that is what food should be. (Just so long, say the lunch box police, as the other daily drinks are water).
