Good Food Bad Food

Last night I sat in my armchair fiddling around with my laptop computer working on a very tricky bit of code to display input and output ingredients for processes in an IDEF0 format.



Out of the corner of my eye I saw (and heard) a program with Jamie Oliver in. From what I could gather he was cooking school lunches in an inner city school somewhere in the north of England.

The amazing thing was that the children there had never seen vegetables or salad being prepared before and some had never even eaten a salad. I could hardly believe my ears.

Today my colleague Tim and I discussed this. It's taken just one generation for us to loose contact with where our food comes from, and to take junk food as the norm. My daughter has a friend who regularly eats McDonalds to the point it forms a substantial part of her diet.

In our house we get an organic veg box from the wonderful Riverford Organics every week. So my kids know what real food is. We very rarely eat anything processed, we live in a village, close to farms that rear animals. From what I can tell my kids are in the minority now, knowing where what they eat comes from.

While I write this, I'm minding some bread in the oven for my wife, who makes it for a farmers market and trades it with the veg man. All very real.

I feel like a lucky man.

We're a lucky family. My wife looks after the kids while I go to work. Is that somehow better than both of us working? Not sure everyone would agree, but we feel very fulfilled by what we have. If Liz could earn more, I'd be just as happy to do the home stuff. We have enough time to live properly and don't have to rush around eating junk.