We Love you, Jamie O

We

   You, Jamie!

I was never really a Jamie fan. The “gercha” and “lovely jubbly” approach was a far cry from the more refined Nigella and encyclopedic knowledge of the legend that is Delia and it was the latter I was used to. I honed my (extremely basic) culinary skills using Delia’s ‘How to Cook’ texts and by listening to the honeyed tones of Ms Lawson.  I would be prone to turn the TV over on hearing the juvenile sound of “bish, bash, bosh.”

Not so now. The young, fresh-faced Jamie O has now blossomed into the foodie freedom fighter with the determination of a half-starved rotweiler giving us gems like ‘Jamie’s School Dinners’ and fighting the good fight for our children to get nutritious and delicious meals at school.

My own experience of how schools approach food, along with my children’s, leaves a lot to be desired.  Rather than instilling a passion for all things healthy and a longingness to get into the kitchen and get prepping, I got the feeling that it was merely a way of filling an hour whilst giving children what they want i.e. cakes and sugar-infused pies. I am sure this isn’t the case with schools now, at least I hope not, but when I and my children attended primary school our first experience of ‘cooking’ there was making rice crispy cakes. Never mind, I thought, it will be different at high school. Okay, fruit did feature on the menu.  In fact my daughter’s first cookery lesson at high school was fruit salad….and they were allowed to use tinned fruit! It got worse.  When gathering the ingredients for her first apple pie I helpfully suggested she could take some windfalls off our tree. Unfortunately not. The teacher had requested them to take a jar of fruit pie filler because they wouldn’t have time to prep the fruit in lesson time! Seriously, I’m not making this up. I have similar stories from my sons. 

What Jamie has given us is like a breath of fresh air. We want children to be equipped for life when they leave home and this includes cooking healthy, easy, nutritious meals. I have made it a personal ambition of mine to instil this on my own three offspring and, now they are all teenagers, I have a rota for the evening meal.  Granted, my youngest two have a repertoire of only two main meals at the moment but we are building on this. Why can’t schools support this too instead on insisting on going for the ‘safe’ cake options? (In fact there are some very easy meals children need to practice and hone before going out into the big wide world.) Schools can’t on the one hand promote healthy eating by joining Change4Life and on the other allow children to stuff themselves with sugary fat-filled foods. They need to fully embrace what a healthy diet is and looks like and lead by example.  Maybe then we can start addressing the huge problem of childhood obesity in this country.