Canning fast food near schools?

MONDAY, JANUARY 24, 2011

Canning fast food near schools?

I know we are at a stage whereby the rules and regulations have to be adapted or employed every five minutes to cope with the ever increasing population.

But just because the same population is increasing girth-wise as well as number-wise, shouldn’t mean that we’ve all lost our marbles in combatting the problem of obesity of kids.

The story here: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/4575807/Call-to-restrict-junk-food-sale-near-schools relates to a call from the Secondary Schools Principals Assn to restrict the hours in which dairies and the like can sell certain foods during certain hours. Now, excuse me – but that is going to achieve what, exactly? And who is any school to dictate to a business owner selling legal goods when they can sell those very same legal goods?

What our children are fed is not the responsibility of either the school or the dairy owner. It is quite simply the responsibility of the parents who are too damned lazy to make their kids lunch, or provide for them the healthy ingredients to make their own – and of government agencies who continually allow over-processed-to-the-point-of-zero-nutrition foods to be sold at all.

These days, who knows what is ‘healthy’ and what is not? I nearly fell over the other day to find out that the bagged salads I sometimes use when my own garden is in hiatus, in actual fact are bathed in a chlorine-based solution. To ensure it lasts, this highly posionous crap is happily slathered around on food I thought was ‘healthy”.

And I am concerned with what I eat. I can never eat avocados grown here in NZ – the only anser to a dreadful allergy I have to them is that we are one of the few countries who use the highly poisonous Hicane. Australia is no problem, I can eat those when there. But not even a lick from an avocado here without resulting in being a screaming heap on the floor in less than 20 minutes.

Many of us have allergies – and many are those from foods that never affected us before. So how much of what is put into or onto these ‘healthy’ foods is actually toxic to us in the long run? It’s not that many years ago that such things were not in practise – so who is toting up the longterm health costs? Smoking lobbyists would have us believe that these days, third-hand smoking is the reason one in three of us get cancer. Poppycock. A leading cancer specialist told me that over a third of all 360-plus cancers are caused by what we eat. Now, where are the lobbyists for that? Do I even hear of anyone in the media bringing this terrible statistic up for a look at the daylight? Nope.

I don’t disagree that there is way too much poor nutrutional standards in the food available out there. Every day at our local dairy, which services four schools within walking distance, you will see not only kids, but mothers with the pursestrings come in and buy ready-made packs of chips, softdrink, crackers and cheese (made in China) or pies to start them off on their daily learning curve.

My kids got sent to school with yoghurt, sandwiches and fruit. Simple, yet healthy. Two minutes to make. So what is it with today’s mothers/caregivers? I worked throughout my kids schooling years and some of the hours I worked weren’t pretty. But they always got fed and got fed well.

I’m not going to buy chips or ready-made packs; I have no need for them. But I dislike intensely someone telling me I can’t buy them because Big Brother has decided they are not good for kids to eat. Of course they are not – but pull the parents up by the short and curlies, not the rest of us.