The Story of Childhood (23 page)

But miracles take longer. There was suspicion that the Schools Food Trust, created by the government following the Jamie Oliver series, would simply add another layer of bureaucracy to proceedings. It later emerged that some schools were locked into contracts with private catering firms that would leave them unable to implement changes for years to come.

The ban on junk food and drink from canteens and school vending machines announced in the autumn of 2005 was encouraging. But the transformation of school dinners will require a sustained commitment when local authority control over meals is negligible following the compulsory competitive tendering of the 1980s, and when some schools don't even have kitchens.

As Jamie Oliver discovered, adults as well as children resist the introduction of healthy foods. A genuine revolution in school meals will need to tackle parental attitudes and marketing to children as well as the basic foodstuffs on offer.

Although childhood obesity remains one of the clearest markers of poverty, malnutrition and bad diet are no longer the preserve of those who cannot afford to eat better. One in five adults are now classified as clinically obese in this country, and obesity in children has increased threefold in the last twenty-five years. The majority of young people eat more
than the recommended amounts of salt, sugar and saturated fats, while consuming less than half the recommended amounts of fruit and vegetables.

Inadequate diet in childhood is laying down risks of cancer, heart disease and diabetes in later life, as well as contributing to behavioural problems in youth. There is convincing evidence linking lack of nutrients – in particular omega 3 and 6 fatty acids – to ADHD and autistic spectrum disorders.

For all the concerns that are noisily articulated about childhood today, it is curious that children's nutrition has only latterly been considered worthy of public action. Perhaps adult ambivalence about food, combined with the stigma that still surrounds obesity, has contributed to this blindspot. Children grow up in a society riven with contradictory messages about food, parented by those who may themselves continue to harbour anxieties around eating habits. On the one hand, what we eat has become a social preoccupation, now variously imbued with messages about status, leisure, love and exoticism. On the other, thinness has never been more prized.

Children are not born demanding burgers. Initial food preferences are biologically driven, the genetic predisposition being to prefer sweet and salty tastes and to dislike bitter and sour ones. These innate preferences are assumed to have served an evolutionary purpose, as sweetness can predict the energy value of foods, while bitter tastes often denote poisonous substances.

Very young children also exhibit a developmental fear of new and unfamiliar tastes, which is again thought to have evolved in order to stop them eating dangerous substances. It has been estimated that approximately ten exposures to a new food are adequate to establish acceptance. Some experts believe that at this stage infants create a ‘weaning library' of
tastes that will influence their preferences for the rest of their lives.

Researchers have found that children can effectively regulate their intake when surrounded by nutritious foods. Children's poor food choices are dictated by what is made available to them – naturally, they will choose a cake over broccoli – but also by what tastes they have become used to. And here manufacturers have become adept at hijacking evolutionary preferences. The ingredient monosodium glutamate, for example, preys upon the disposition to like salt, but increases the level at which it is satisfied. Because children's preferences are still in flux it is possible to subvert their tastes permanently, creating higher thresholds from which there is no retreat.

While unhealthy, processed foods are marketed as cost-effective and quick to cook, fresh and organic produce remains prohibitively expensive for many people. It takes time, energy and nutritional intelligence to prepare meals from scratch on a daily basis. Knowledge of basic cooking techniques – even the ability to identify different varieties of fruits and vegetables – is no longer passed down through families.

But eating is a psychological as well as a physiological process. Children are more likely to eat foods that they see teachers, parents and peers eating. But, in a generation, there has been a shift to cooking separate meals for children. It has been suggested that, with more parents working longer hours, denial or provision of food has taken on more emotional significance. Studies have shown that when children are rewarded for eating their ability to regulate disappears and their intake increases. Early experience of food being used in a system of reward or punishment has also been linked to the development of eating disorders in adolescence.

Similarly, food is the primary site where children themselves assert control. Refusing to eat certain foodstuffs is how toddlers first differentiate their needs. Teenaged sufferers of anorexia nervosa and bulimia are often thought to be using their condition as a way of controlling their changing physicality or of managing psychological pressures. The sociologist Alison James believes that children can use food to structure their identities in the face of adult authority.

While conducting fieldwork at a village youth club in the north-east of England, James noticed that local adults and children both used the dialect word ‘ket' or ‘kets', but that adults used it to refer to something diseased or inedible, while children used it to describe penny or cheap sweets. In the essay that resulted from her observations, she suggests it is no coincidence that rubbish and sweets share the same moniker.

James discovered that children used the term only for those sweets at the lower end of the price range. They were comically named and brightly coloured, often in luminous shades wholly absent from adult foodstuffs. They also offered what she neatly describes as ‘a unique digestive experience': gobstoppers that fill the mouth completely; Fruit Salad chews that leave the jaw aching; Space Dust that explodes violently on the tongue. They were attractive because they stood in contrast to conventional adult sweets and adult eating-patterns, she argues, not only in their names, their colours and the sensations they induced but also in the timing and manner of their consumption. So kets were munched haphazardly between meals, and sucks on kets were shared, in flagrant disregard of the eating conventions instilled in early childhood.

Interestingly, kets were never advertised. James's idea of children using their food choices to assert their identity
becomes muddied when those choices are thrust before them by adult marketing executives. The advertising industry has been quick to reframe its activities in terms of children's empowerment. But how empowered is the average British child who, it has been estimated, views up to 5,000 advertisements for junk food every year?

It would seem that food advertising has contributed to major changes in children's eating habits. In the UK, the Office of National Statistics estimates that children spend more than a third of their pocket money on sweets, snacks and take-aways. In 2004, the food company Organix found that children as young as four were eating up to eighty additives a day.

The food industry would have it that it is parents' rather than manufacturers' responsibility to feed children well. Yet they have historically fought legislation on food labelling, while exploiting parents' desire for healthy products for their children. In 2004, for example, Friends of the Earth discovered that the ‘Kids' Snack Pack Carrots' on sale at Tesco were thirteen times the price of the chain's ‘Value' carrots.

But the industry is always quick to enumerate other possible causes for the rise in childhood obesity: fewer children walking to school, lack of outdoor play time, the increase in working mothers who have less time to prepare meals from scratch.

It is not only the amount of junk, but the manner in which that junk is promoted, that may prove harmful to children. Many companies now use story books, interactive websites, toys and games to sell their products. It's a strategy known as ‘trans-toying': turning everyday items into playthings either by altering their nature – in the case of Heinz green ketchup – or by associating them with other toys, like
Primula's
Scooby-Doo
lunch-boxes or the free gifts that proliferate in cereal cartons.

A report by the Food Commission in 2005 criticised a number of manufacturers employing this practice. Culprits included a Mars-branded arithmetic book promoting M&M sweets, and McDonald's-licensed fast-food toys like play cash registers, plastic burgers and chicken nuggets. At the Frosties Tigercathlon website, children earn points by taking part in races in a virtual stadium, but only if their cartoon characters pick up packets of Frosties to give them power. (Kellogg's, the manufacturer of Frosties, was criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority in 2004 for implying that Frosties cereal was a healthy product when at the time it contained 40 per cent sugar.)

This trend may be impacting on children's psychological as well as physical development. Boston economist Juliet Schor wonders: ‘If all children's experiences are geared towards excitement, surprise, and thrills, they may not discover that happiness and well-being are mainly gained through an appreciation of the quotidian. They may never learn to appreciate the taste of good, wholesome food if they are taught that eating is equivalent to playing.' She quotes the Harvard psychologist Susan Linn, one of America's leading critics of marketing to children: ‘Marketers would have us believe that the purpose of food is to play with it. Isn't that an obscene value, when there are people in the world who are starving?'

Some consumer activists have called for a ban on television advertising of junk foods during children's programmes. But, like bans of violent media content, blanket gestures like this only move the problem elsewhere, creating enticing taboos where none existed before. It is impossible to insulate children entirely, nor is it worthwhile.

In a comprehensive review of children's ‘media literacy', the Institute of Education's Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media found that educational efforts designed as ‘counter-propaganda' were less successful than approaches that start from an engagement with the capacity and interests of children in their use of commercial media. It is better, surely, to encourage the skills necessary for navigating the changing advertising landscape, whilst moderating children's exposure to messages they are still learning to interpret. Adults may not be able to change commercial culture, but they can change children's position within it, by treating childhood not only as a time of vulnerability.

A week later, Adam is still on holiday, and toasting his back at the kitchen stove. The scratch on his nose has scabbed itchily. He arranges a selection of animals on the hearth beside him while his father makes lunch. He has Beaky the eagle, a spider monkey, who has much longer arms than Monkey, and a small badger.

Bramble the badger is the school mascot, and each holiday a different child is allowed to take her home. They voted on the name, and ‘Bramble' got the most votes, though Adam voted for ‘Woody'.

It's quiet while his dad chops up vegetables for lunch. The clock is ticking, the stove is throbbing, and Adam reads his comics. He's had four: two
Beanos
, one
Dandy
and one
Bananaman
. He got a free hairy Gnasher badge with this one. At Oswestry Baths this morning he swam fifteen lengths. Each length is fifty metres. He did breast-stroke, underwater with no arms, and floating on his back but not backstroke. There are twelve levels in swimming and he's on level six.

In Durham at the golden wedding he saw a few of his uncles and some aunts. There were about thirty people
altogether. ‘We had some tea and spoke to a few friends. I played on my own while the others were saying goodbye to people and then we went.' Adam often refers to his parents as ‘the others'. They are a gang of three, not divided by generation. Sometimes he thinks it would good to have brothers and sisters, like when he's playing outside and he wants to play a game but the others are busy. Brothers and sisters can annoy you, though.

On the way back from Durham, they went to the pub and to Beamish. At Beamish there was a high street with old-fashioned shops and at the confectioner's he got a yellow sugar mouse and some chocolate raisins. They also stayed at a hotel, which wasn't bad. You got a TV there that wasn't just a video.

It's only two days, Saturday and Sunday, until he goes back to school. ‘I don't want to really,' he admits. ‘I just like being with my mum and dad. I won't see my dad until six o'clock when we have tea and I'll see my mum when she picks me up from school.' Adam's father is an engineer, who makes the plastic things that you put behind windows. Although his mother works two days a week as a physiotherapist, her professional life is not understood in terms of absence, but rather as something curious that happens when his time is otherwise occupied.

This week he's stayed at home, playing by himself. He likes board-games and jigsaws and doing things, like making planes. Sometimes he pretends to be other people, like the people of
The Lord of the Rings
. ‘I like the way they move,' he says reverently. Adam likes to move too. He is limber and precise, and one can't imagine him ever being clumsy. He likes to experiment with facial expressions and different ways of articulating his body. Sometimes it seems unconscious, an absent-minded waggle of the head, or, like
now, walking against the walls to get to his bedroom.

He starts to sort the cuddly toys under his bed. Their names are explanatory, often influenced by the maker's tag or place of purchase. This one looks like a person but it's really a monkey finger-puppet. He got it in Seventh Heaven, which is a bed shop where you order beds and they deliver them to you. ‘The lady knew that I was very fond of monkeys.'