Hard to swallow

My new article on spiked

It's undoubtedly a good thing to feed children the best food we can. But TV chef Jamie Oliver's campaign for better school meals is being used as a weapon in a cultural war about what we eat.

Food is discussed in black-and-white terms. On the one hand, we have mass-produced convenience meals produced by large companies, designed to be dished up easily at your local takeaway, or bought by the car load from the supermarket down the road. On the other, we have local food bought daily from local shops, preferably organic and always freshly prepared. In this simplified and moralised version of reality, the industrialised food is 'bad'; the small-scale food is 'good'.

Jamie's School Dinners made a number of assertions about the effects of processed food on children. According to the programme, children eating freshly prepared food are less likely to be obese, more likely to behave better, and have fewer asthma attacks.

Most luridly, it claimed that some children were now so constipated that they were vomiting their own faeces, and that this new generation were the first expected to die before their parents.

These claims deserve to be challenged because they create unnecessary fears about what we eat and, by implication, reflect badly on those who allow children to eat certain kinds of food.

Read on...