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Health: Obesity

My Lords, there is only one cause of obesity and that is taking in more calories than you use up. For a normal active child on a healthy diet there is really no problem about obesity—the difficulty arises when they either eat too many calories or use up too few, or perhaps both. My noble friend Lord Addington will talk about the issue of sport and exercise and their role in using up calories and strengthening the heart. So, apart from recommending dancing as a very enjoyable and fashionable way of taking exercise in these days of the popularity of "Strictly", I am going to concentrate on one of my favourite topics: food. I love food. Indeed, I would die without it. I like to grow it, pick it, cook it, eat it and socialise with it. I certainly like to know as much as possible about what is in the food that I do not grow myself and how it was produced. I have a great aversion to factory-farmed meat with all its animal health issues and to battery hens and eggs. I have also found that children are fascinated by growing and picking food and then, of course, eating it. However, one of the main causes of child obesity these days is that their parents do not cook, so they eat a lot of fast food or processed food. Then you really do not know what is in it; there is often too much salt, too much sugar, too many additives or preservatives and too many calories. But when you cook your own food you know exactly what is in it. You can have a wonderful school meals service, and I will say more about that later, but if the parents cannot or will not cook at home, school meals are only taking care of a minor, though important, portion of the child’s diet, although the advent of breakfast clubs has increased that proportion. Having been brought up in a household where my mother cooked and then taught me, I find it sad that there are many young parents who did not have that advantage and did not learn to cook at school, since for many years it was not taught. Indeed, many schools simply did not have the facilities, and then we had a subject on the curriculum called Food Design and Technology which had more to do with processing, packaging and labelling than with real food. However, these days cooking has become part of the entertainment industry so, even if you did not learn at school, you can hardly fail to see cooking done on TV. How many cookery programmes are there, and what proportion of books and magazines are devoted to it? Cookery books have become bedtime reading, but I sometimes doubt how much of their contents land up on the plate. But I wonder what other leisure activity saves you money, improves your health and extends your life. Famous chefs may not thank me for saying this but I think cooking is not difficult. Certainly, following the many recipes you find in women’s magazines and even newspapers is not too difficult. I cooked a soup from the weekend Guardian on Monday. I think the Sainsbury’s Magazine in particular has done a fine job in showing that cooking can be easy, fun and accessible, and I would point out that you do not have to shop at Sainsbury’s to read it. These magazines, if the recipes for family meals were followed, would certainly save a great deal more than their cover price for the family budget. In these times of recession, many magazines have concentrated on economical cuts of meat and other cheaper but nourishing ingredients. I think that it is more a matter of confidence than ability when people say they cannot cook. So how do we get over that? We must certainly teach children to cook in school. How are the Government getting on with their pledge that every child will learn to cook? I heard an excellent programme on Radio 4 last week about school food. It talked about one particular school where the 11 and 12 year-olds were actually helping in the school kitchen to cook school lunches and food for the breakfast club. The health and safety issues had been overcome and the idea was being rolled out across the county. The cook was running after-school cookery clubs for parents, showing them how to make some of the dishes that were most popular with the children. There is now, I am pleased to say, a lot of this sort of innovation in schools. School dinner ladies and gentlemen have vastly improved their skills, and facilities have improved enormously under the Building Schools for the Future programme. It is five years since Jamie Oliver, inspired by a particular dinner lady who has now taken a national role, called attention to the state of our children’s school food, and enormous strides have been made since then. I pay tribute to him and the school caterers, the School Food Trust and the many schools that have put their minds to improving their food and attracting more children to choose it over packed meals. Mind you, there is nothing at all wrong in principle with a packed meal as long as it is healthy and balanced, though I would much rather have a hot one in this weather. The advantages of children taking school meals are many. Apart from the new criteria on quality, balance and nutritional content, which are difficult to achieve in a packed lunch, they learn to socialise when eating, which is what they will do for the rest of their lives. They learn table manners and about green issues, such as food miles and GM, and about the food culture of other cultures, and, in the best schools, they are encouraged to be adventurous and try a little of something they do not get at home. There are lots of good reasons for making school food attractive to children so that they will choose it. Some schools encourage children to bring in recipes that their parents cook at home. Some that have the space have started a school garden where the children grow fruit and vegetables and then cook and eat them. I heard about one school that displayed its very first lettuce from the school garden with such pride on the counter at lunchtime that I am not sure if anyone ate it. I understand that pride. My husband often laughs when I come in from the garden proudly laden with my own produce—he laughs and then he eats it. Unfortunately, many schools do not have the open space to enable them to grow food. Does the Minister know of any scheme whereby other land such as a free allotment might be made available for a school that wanted it? Of course, many of us these days are so busy that we rush our food. There is a great danger of that in schools as well, since there is a limited time for lunch and hundreds of children to get through the system. It presents a great logistical problem. However, I am very concerned about one particular solution to this: the biometric solution whereby children are fingerprinted and pass through the till by putting their finger on a screen that then deducts the cost from the balance their parents have put into their account. Some schools have done this without asking or even telling the parents, and I feel that it is an infringement of the child’s privacy. I have every sympathy with the need for a quick cashless system but I feel that a personal bar code would be more acceptable. Of course a cashless system also has the advantage of lacking stigma for those children on free school meals, but there are other ways of doing that. There are also lunchtime clubs to which children want to rush off so they hate queuing in the dining room, which is an enormous challenge for the caterers. This is one of the most frequent reasons given by secondary-age pupils for not having school meals. The trouble is that their solution is often not a packed lunch but whatever they happen to buy at the nearest supermarket or fast food outlet. That is why education for the pupils themselves about the importance of a healthy diet is vital for preventing obesity. In the end it is the child who will choose his food, but I strongly support those head teachers who make it a school policy that children do not leave the premises at lunchtime, particularly because of the social problems that it often causes in the neighbourhood when hordes of teenagers descend on the local chip shop. I realise that I will not make myself popular with the managers of chip shops by saying this. As long as the school meals offer is attractive, good value and of high quality, and there is an option of a packed lunch, I see no reason why such a policy should not be enforced. Therefore, it is important that as many children as possible take school meals, now that they are usually of good quality. Price, of course, is an issue for hard pressed families. I am sure that you can put together a filling packed lunch more cheaply than a school lunch, but it may not be as nourishing. Only this week, the School Food Trust has suggested that schools should offer discounts or special offers on lunches for a limited period to encourage children to try school meals, just like a January sale. The trust says that such a move would dramatically increase take-up of healthy school meals as demand for school food is more sensitive to price changes than other foods. Research by London Economics has estimated that a 10 per cent increase in the price of school meals can lead to a fall in take-up of between 7 and 10 per cent. The trust adds that areas where discounts have been offered have successfully boosted demand. A three-week period of discounts in 2009 in York and Waltham Forest increased take-up by 22 per cent and 10 per cent respectively according to an analysis of the relationship between school meal take-up and prices. I accept that it can be very difficult for caterers to keep quality up and prices down. However, there have been interesting experiments whereby local councils have made school meals available free to all pupils, not just to those who qualify for them. This increased uptake terrifically and, I believe, improved school discipline and learning, but it is hard for a council to offer such a programme in these constrained days. However, the results showed that the outcomes were very beneficial to both behaviour and learning. Do the Government have any plans to do their own experiments along these lines in order to inform national policy? I end by giving your Lordships an example of what can be done given the will to do it. I found this case study, and many more interesting ones, on the School Food Trust website. In 2004, six Liverpool primary schools identified the need to improve the quality and choice of their food, so they set up a not-for-profit consortium called Food for Thought, an apt name given that children’s ability to learn has often been reliably shown to be affected by what they have for breakfast or lunch. They brought in lots of partners including the local authority and the local Sure Start programme and invested their delegated budgets in it. Within a year they were delivering meals in all six schools, replacing processed food with homemade dishes from fresh locally reared and sourced ingredients. Meal prices remained fixed and were cheaper than the meals at other schools provided by the city council. Menus run on a six-week cycle, subject to pupil preference and the seasonal availability of produce. Staff rotate across the schools and share best practice. Children are encouraged to experiment and get a more varied diet than before. They have open days when parents can come in and try the food with the children, and they are pleasantly surprised. Local NHS staff deliver training and taster sessions for parents, teaching them about diet and nutrition. They also have small groups of children helping in the kitchen to prepare the food. The result was a 67 per cent increase in uptake in one school and big improvements in the others. Children enjoy their food and look forward to it. Their director, Mike Carden, says: ""The solution to healthy food is to develop a service that actually cooks its own meals. It is only by adding value to fresh vegetables, meat and fish in the kitchen that real costs and real quality can be managed effectively"." I quite agree with him, especially in these days when, for so many families, cost is a real issue. We are what we eat. It is only by cooking from basic ingredients that you can feed a family on a tight budget, so we owe it to our children to teach them how to do it and to make sure that our schools have the facilities to do that.