[Sca-cooks] OT - Somewhat amusing in light of recent healthy food rants

[Johnna Holloway]

I saw this last evening but never got back on to post a mention.
Having living there for a year (84-85) and made several visits
back, I have an odd viewpoint of course. I always thought
that Cadbury eggs were a food group too. I can remember being on
a public bus and listening to two senior (OAP's) ladies having a 
conversation
as regards the marketing. The one allowed as how that frozen foods
weren't healthy for one. Ah, except, I do fancy frozen peas, said the other.
They then both agreed that peas were the only thing that should be frozen.
This would have been the fall of 84. Along the same veins,
there's this new book out in the UK and Canada.
*Bad Food Britain (Paperback) *
by Joanna Blythman 
<http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/702-0364078-3063234?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Joanna%20Blythman> 

       Publisher Comments:

What is it about the British and food? We just don't get it, do we? 
Britain is notorious worldwide for its bad food and increasingly 
corpulent population but it's a habit we just can't seem to kick.

Welcome to the country where recipe and diet books feature constantly in 
top 10 bestseller lists but where the average meal takes only eight 
minutes to prepare and people spend more time watching celebrity chefs 
cooking on TV than doing any cooking themselves, the country where a 
dining room table is increasingly becoming an optional item of 
furniture. Welcome to the nation that is almost pathologically obsessed 
with the safety and provenance of food but which relies on 
factory-prepared ready meals for sustenance, eating four times more of 
them than any other country in Europe, the country that never has its 
greasy fingers out of a packet of crisps, consuming more than the rest 
of Europe put together. Welcome to the affluent land where children eat 
food that is more nutririonally impoverished than their counterparts in 
South African townships, the country where hospitals can sell fast-food 
burgers but not home-baked cake, the G8 state where even the Prime 
Minister refuses to eat broccoli.

Award-winning investigative food journalist Joanna Blythman takes us on 
an amusing, perceptive and subversive journey through Britain's 
contemporary food landscape and traces the roots of our contemporary 
food troubles in deeply engrained ideas about class, modernity and 
progress.

Johnnae



Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:
>  From yesterday's New York Times food section:
>> October 18, 2006
>> ROTHERHAM JOURNAL
>> Glorious Food? English Schoolchildren Think Not
>> By SARAH LYALL
>> ROTHERHAM, England — Five months after the celebrity chef Jamie  
>> Oliver succeeded in cajoling, threatening and shaming the British  
>> government into banning junk food from its school cafeterias, many  
>> schools are learning that you can lead a child to a healthy lunch,  
>> but you can’t make him eat.