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As National Childhood Obesity Week gets underway this week (July 1-7), Mark Rigby of the Craft Guild of Chefs and co-ordinator of the association’s Family Food Appreciation workshops run in conjunction with LACA, offers his views on the obesity challenge and how this initiative can help tackle it.

The idea is to work with schools and school caterers to develop a family bond through food knowledge and preparing food that is time-saving, cost-effective and nutritionally balanced.

Ultimately we want to combat the effect of two generations who have not been educated in diet health and general life skills. In so doing we want to help bring obesity in the UK under control.

Eight out of 10 children whose parents are both obese will become obese themselves, so goes the latest statistic. But, how did we get here? It all started at the end of the 1970s with the emergence of fast, convenient food and faster paced lifestyles.

The cultural change almost happened overnight. School catering departments started to gear down in what we call traditional, freshly cooked food, wholesalers changed their business models and retailers changed the way they sold food to the consumer. Today, we think we don’t have time to cook, but the reality is we’ve just been convinced we do not have time to cook and it started here.

Lifestyles became more sedentary and we stopped planning to eat, not like when families would have three pre-planned square meals a day. We now graze all the time, which means we are never really hungry and are constantly topping up calories, never burning enough off. We created the perfect conditions for this epidemic to thrive and are paying the price.

With the introduction of the school nutritional standards in 2006, there was a knee jerk reaction to bring cookery back into schools with a hard focus on balanced, nutritious lunches. It was done very quickly and many schools weren’t geared up to deal with it in terms of equipment or skilled staff.

The change in lifestyle culture in the home also wasn’t accounted for. Cooking lessons were re-introduced in schools, but when children returned home, they reverted to type. You think about the mother who sneaked McDonald’s in through the school gates and the parents who liquefied it for their newborn. Whatever you do with the child, the parent is the ultimate influence.     

It got us thinking, why not introduce parents to cooking through the children? We also realised how important it was to involve school caterers, bring the three key elements together, not educating the three pockets in isolation.

The Family Food Apppreciation workshops also had to be fun, not complicated or onerous. Why else were children playing cooking games on their computers, but not cooking?

Since our workshops were launched, we’ve had some great feedback. After one workshop, which looked at spring salads and veg and, specifically, where lettuces got their names, the children went back to their class and one of them couldn’t stop talking about iceberg and how it was shipped over in ice from America. He had apparently had never eaten a piece of salad or veg in school in his life.

Ultimately, it’s early days, but parents are saying they now do more cooking at home. We’d also like to see more young people look at the chef profession, not just take cooking for granted.

You can get more information at: www.craftguildofchefs.org