Food Futures: Feeding the Next Generation

‘Babies of even just a few months’ old get a pretty good look at almost everything that goes in their mouth. And as soon as they take an interest in their surroundings, they will be observing more than you think about where the food they eat comes from. Babies who are fed predominantly from a jar will inevitably think that food comes, predominantly, from a jar. Those babies who get to watch their parent peeling a banana and mashing it on a plate before offering it up on a spoon will quickly understand that there may be more to dinnertime than opening jars.’

A while ago I read about a school in America that had created an almighty row by slaughtering and chopping up a cow in class. It seems the idea of the session was to give a simple anatomy class while fostering a better understanding among pupils of where meat comes from. The gist of the lesson, in a nutshell, was ‘hamburgers don’t grow on trees’.

I was stunned by this story. The idea of making a group of impressionable children in their early teens watch the death of an animal and then participate in cutting it up into smaller and smaller pieces until it finally resembled something they might occasionally have seen under a cling-wrap covering in a supermarket chill cabinet was, I thought, quite simply … brilliant!

Why? Because the industrial food machine, in the UK as in America, is abusing food animals in their millions. The trade depends on secrecy and a widespread disassociation in the minds of the general public between the meat we eat and the animals from which it comes. It is our consequent ignorance and indifference that has allowed the food industry to march from one disgraceful calamity to another in recent years.

So any graphic demonstration – to children or adults – of just what is required to put a burger in a bun is fine by me. If that makes some punters become vegetarians, so be it. If it leads others to question the way our livestock are being reared, and to seek out meat from animals that have lived outdoors with the sun on their backs, moved freely in appropriate social groups, and fed on a natural diet appropriate for their species, then even better.

Every new generation – in fact, every new young life – presents an opportunity for better education about food, and therefore better food futures for all of us. I think the cow in the classroom is a great idea, and that learning to butcher a carcass, or at the very least to bone out a leg of lamb, is something everyone should have the opportunity to do at school. But education about food begins long before lessons in anatomy – before, even, counting and the alphabet. It begins as soon as something, other perhaps than mother’s own milk, passes an infant’s lips. And it begins at home. Babies of even just a few months’ old get a pretty good look at almost everything that goes in their mouth. And as soon as they take an interest in their surroundings, they will be observing more than you think about where the food they eat comes from. Babies who are fed predominantly from a jar will inevitably think that food comes, predominantly, from a jar. Those babies who get to watch their parent peeling a banana and mashing it on a plate before offering it up on a spoon will quickly understand that there may be more to dinnertime than opening jars.

The best early food education you can give your children is to introduce them to as many different foods as possible, in as unrefined a state as possible. Of course, there are some foods, notably eggs and nuts, and anything with added salt, that should not be offered to small babies. And apples, we know, should be peeled for the under-twos, to avoid the risk of choking. But there is no reason why you can’t show and tell your toddler how and why you’re peeling the apple, as you do so in front of him or her. For kids of all ages, feeding time can be about so much more than just good nutrition. It is an opportunity to present even the tiniest babies with a whole range of exciting shapes and colours, textures and even sounds. And for older children starting to make sense of objects in the world around them, watching and helping as a pile of ingredients is transformed, by peeling, slicing, heating, stirring, into something they can actually eat, is a gentle practical lesson in maths, physics, chemistry, biology and language, all rolled into one – and they don’t even know they’re studying!

We found that our son, Oscar, who is now four, from the very earliest age took an interest in what was happening in the kitchen, especially at the cooker and in the sink. Ever since he became steady on his feet, he has had his own little table, which he pushes around the kitchen and climbs on top of to put him at a more practical level in relation to the work top. He understands that the cooker is hot and dangerous and out of bounds – but he’s still allowed to watch, from a safe distance, as Mummy fries him a pancake or Daddy mashes the potatoes. At the sink we cut him a little slack. Washing potatoes and carrots – surely among the more tedious of kitchen tasks – is for him a joyous game of splashing water and fumbling with the vegetables under a gushing tap. So he gets a bit wet, and maybe the vegetables he passes as ‘clean’ could do with an extra buff. But he’s getting better, and staying dryer, with every session.

Once kids have demonstrated their enthusiasm for handling raw fruit and vegetables, and shown a bit of confidence, if not competence, at the kitchen sink, then it’s time to move them on a bit. They’re clearly more than ready to learn to grow their own food. Far-fetched? Hardly. When I was a kid, we all did it. It was either mustard and cress on an old wet flannel on the windowsill or bean sprouts in jars in the airing cupboard. And we loved it. The best bit, of course, was the harvest, and that first, slightly gritty, home-grown mustard and cress sandwich (made with sliced white bread, of course – we’re talking 1970 here).

Oscar is now playing an enlarged game of mustard and cress, which I suppose should technically be called, ‘carrots, leaf beet and tatsoi’ – though that obviously isn’t quite as catchy. Instead of an old flannel, we bought him a wooden planting trough from the local garden centre. Filled with a bag of potting compost mixed with a bit of topsoil, it is the perfect height for toddler gardening. Oscar sowed the seeds and has been watering his little garden whenever the man upstairs fails to oblige. Although the beet and carrots have some way to go, the tatsoi – an oriental green leaf not unlike cress, in fact – is just coming good. And Oscar likes the mildly peppery, crunchy-stalked leaves almost as much as he likes chocolate finger biscuits. All right, I exaggerate, but he does actually swallow them without spitting them out.

As for the relationship between meat and the animals from which it comes, Oscar understands this, dare I say it, better than some adults I know. He loves to come with me to feed the pigs, chickens and cows. But when two of the pigs came back from the slaughterhouse, colder and a lot less lively than he’d ever seen them before, it didn’t phase him one jot. He watched with deep fascination as Ray the butcher and I cut them up. He helped us twist the sausages into strings, and when he got bored of that he picked up an eyeball from the table and ran around in a frenzy of excitement, shouting ‘Pig’s eye! Pig’s eye!’ And when he’d finished with the eye, he took the tail.

He’s seen me skin and joint a rabbit, and catch, kill and gut a fish. He’s eaten the rabbit, knowing precisely what it is, and had the fish served up whole on his plate. He watches impatiently as we carefully take the flesh off the bones, then he tucks in greedily. The way I see it, a fish finger is just a meal. A whole fish is an education.

None of this seems remotely odd or ghoulish to me, nor, I am convinced, does it to Oscar. If, in years to come, he decides to become a vegetarian, I suppose someone might point out the traumas of a childhood exposed to the corpses of slaughtered animals and say that it’s all my fault. And maybe they’d have a point. My point is that meat does come from slaughtered animals. That is a fact we must not hide from our children. If they decide that slaughtering animals is wrong, and therefore that they do not wish to eat meat, that is a decision we can respect. It will have been made in light of the facts.

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