In an interview with second wave feminist Anna Whitehouse (aka Mutha Pukka), sentient potato Keir Starmer brazenly stated that the impetus behind a new breakfast club pilot scheme was not, I dunno, to help feed some of the 2.7 million children experiencing food insecurity on his watch. But instead to grease the wheels of capitalism. In other words, let’s dump the kids with low-paid, under-valued workers so that middle-class mothers can go bust their asses for some consultancy in the city. Cool.
Look, this is complicated. Fat folks shouldn’t have to perform ‘health’ and ‘fitness’ in order to have fundamental human rights. AND, in the age of Ozempic-core, it feels essential that basic principles like Health at Every Size are being reported in mainstream media.
I think CvT could learn a lot from the Danes here; we don’t have to shame and disgust people into eating better. But there is a world where public health nutrition and industry can co-create a food system that supports health. (Even though it’s not clear to me what’s being done to address underlying socioeconomic factors…)
There’s nothing particularly surprising here. In some ways I think it’s important to establish minimum nutrition criteria in early years settings. But as Francesca Vaghi wrote in her book Food Policy and Practice in Early Childhood Education and Care 'whilst for adults it is what children eat that often matters most, to children it is how they eat that is more important'. How do we make sure we support children to eat well without replicating harmful power dynamics?
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