Vocal Voices

The official sounding Royal Society for Public Health, it is not it is a charity of well meaning individuals, has a new report out. Its headline statistic is that 25% of school pupils order in takeaways for lunch.

What? A quarter of pupils get deliveries of big Macs, three piece chicken deals, pizzas, meatball subs, kormas and chow meins. We need to ACT! We need to BAN something, anything! The STATE has to get involved. Food labelling has to be clear. If nothing is done the sky will fall in.

Read further, however, and it turns out that 25% of 13 to 18 year-olds have, at some stage, not eaten a healthy meal at lunch. This is new, it has never happened before, has it?

Oh wait. Was that me and my mates in the '60s nipping out to the chippy every now and then for fish cake and chips rather than suffer the crap in the refectory? Of course it was, it has always happened. We didn't need labels, we just knew the fish was haddock and the chips fried in beef dripping were delicious. The difference between then and now is that is that most of our free time was spent running and jumping and kicking a ball about and skipping. Those are the reasons we were not fat, but back in those days we had playing fields and parks.

Workingman wrote:we were not fat, but back in those days we had playing fields and parks.

Yep and we didn't have a TV in each bedroom, computers, mobile phones or, even, a 4 function calculator. Entertainment was at our discretion and we usually played physical games to amuse ourselves. Although some played chess or other things.

But, god forbid, we couldn't mention that could we???

Suff wrote:But, god forbid, we couldn't mention that could we???

Looking at some of the comments we certainly can't, people who do get marked down.

Even more worrying is the number of those in the better labelling, more education, ban this, ban that, brigade. They cannot grasp that they have been conditioned to think that way by the constant barrage of propaganda that experts and government know what is best for us.

It used to be socialists and others on the left who wanted total control, now everyone is getting in on the act.

I agree, it is definitely the lack of exercise, and just movement in everyday life, to blame rather than diet. The food in the '60s and '70s was full of stodge and sugar!