Another week, another government offensive against childhood obesity. This time it’s a fresh round of pleas for new levies on junk food. And right on cue, out come the sympathetic pundits with a familiar lament: the poor simply can’t afford to eat well. Carrots are unaffordable and broccoli is a luxury that only the middle class can stretch to.
It’s a predictable narrative. It’s also wrong, or at least, far from the whole truth.
I say this having lived the messy reality of fostering, where I’ve had the privilege, and sometimes pain, of stepping into lives different from my own. For more than 20 years, I’ve cared for children pulled from homes where parenting skills are scarce and where ‘dinner’ might consist of a handful of sweets and a packet of crisps.
Fresh from peeling carrots, the children swarmed the bowl like it was the first hot meal they’d ever seen
What I’ve learned is that the reliance on junk food is more often attributable to a sheer bewilderment at the notion that food might involve more than a microwave ping. Take Justine (not her real name), the 23-year-old I came to know when her three toddlers, all under four, born a frantic year apart, landed in my care. The social worker tasked me with not only nurturing the children, but ‘mothering’ Justine as well. She was granted supervised contact sessions in my home, a glimpse of normal family life amid the turmoil of care proceedings. Before her first visit, I suggested a small step towards responsibility – perhaps she would like to bring ‘tea’ for her children?
Justine arrived with a carrier bag and a faint tang of cannabis clinging to her hoodie. She waved off my suggestion that we eat at the dining table and plonked down on the living room rug instead. Out came a jar of frankfurters, some cola and a grease-spotted bag of doughnuts. The children dove in, alternating sticky bites of fried dough with fizzy slurps and chomps of pale, wobbly sausages.
I watched from the sidelines, a mixture of pity and fury bubbling in my chest. These weren’t fussy eaters – they were survivors, conditioned to hoover up whatever landed in front of them. ‘Aren’t you joining them?’ I ventured, nodding at the rug-bound feast. In my armchair, Justine didn’t look up from her phone. ‘Nah,’ she drawled as her thumbs flew across the screen. ‘Wouldn’t touch that crap. I’ll grab a KFC on the way home.’
Justine wasn’t an abuser. She’d been green-lit for home visits precisely because she posed no threat. She was just a weary young woman adrift in a system that encouraged her total lack of ambition and hope. She wasn’t poor in the sense that she couldn’t afford to live – her basic costs were entirely covered by the state – but in the skills sense, she was absolutely skint.
The state wasn’t just footing the bill for her children’s care (emergency fostering isn’t cheap); Justine was still handed food vouchers meant to nudge struggling families towards fresh produce and whole grains. Unfortunately, she’d blow them on jars and packets. Why labour over a chopping board when the ready-made aisle beckons?
Over the next few weeks, I chipped away at Justine’s resistance to what she called ‘grind’. ‘Fancy making a lasagne?’ I asked one day, waving a bag of mince and a 45p tin of tomatoes. Her eyes narrowed. ‘Can’t be arsed,’ she said. ‘No one does that no more. You can get ’em frozen for a few quid.’
Justine was living on benefits, but each of her children had their own iPad, which conveniently kept their attention away from her during visits. When I stashed them away, suggesting we play instead, Justine looked more panicked by the idea than her children.
I’m not here to demonise her. Bounced from placement to placement as a child, she’d missed out on the after-school ritual of chopping veg with a mother figure, and the chatter over dinner about scraped knees or playground triumphs. No one had borne witness to her small victories, or mourned her quiet defeats. So it was small wonder the kitchen felt like alien territory.
Slowly, I coaxed her in. We started small, a shepherd’s pie, with her insisting: ‘They’ll hate it. Kids want nuggets.’ But she stirred the mince with curiosity, and when it turned from red to brown, she gasped in amused awe. Fresh from peeling carrots, the children swarmed the bowl like it was the first hot meal they’d ever seen, and they were soon wearing as much gravy as they ate. The real epiphany came when I tallied up the cost. ‘Less than a few quid for all that?!’ she gasped, as if I were some sort of alchemist.
From there, it snowballed. Lasagne nights became a ritual, the toddlers ‘helping’ by layering pasta sheets and sprinkling cheese. Justine laughed, actually laughed, at their mess, her phone abandoned on the worktop. For the first time she saw food as a way to connect, to claim a sliver of control in a life that had offered precious little.
Justine’s story isn’t unique. I’ve seen it replayed in a dozen homes – parents not too broke for takeaways, but paralysed by the idea of doing something for themselves. And now, with an obesity rate of almost 25 per cent among 10- and 11-year-old children, the government’s knee-jerk fix is more taxes on the naughty stuff, assuming a levy on crisps will magically summon salads to the plate.
I’m not claiming that healthier foods don’t cost more. Justine is correct in that the junk equivalent ready-meal often costs less. But for low-income families, more levies is a gut-punch that won’t suddenly muster chopping skills out of thin air. It will sting the poorest hardest, driving them deeper into the arms of discount doughnuts or Deliveroo.
The fix needs to be foundational. Bring back home economics, once a staple for teaching the arts of budgeting, baking and basic nutrition. Today’s teens might be able to code an app, but they have no idea how to roast a chicken. Make it fun and collaborative, with teams competing to whip up the cheapest chilli. Crucially, send the recipes home. Let the children be the teachers. ‘Look, Mum, we made this for a quid!’
It worked with Justine. Once hooked, she graduated to solo shops, her trolley groaning with actual greens. Her children, back with her eventually under tight supervision, started clamouring for ‘Mummy’s lasagne’. For every Justine, there are thousands more who need that spark of hope.
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