Stop preaching to the poor
This week, my 3-year-old son ate peanut butter on toast for dinner one night, twominute noodles and mince for another, and rounded off the week with fish and chips. This is not because I cannot access fresh vegetables. It’s not because I don’t know how to cook. It is because of a multitude of reasons including my child being tired and hungry at 5pm when dinner isn’t yet ready, or flat-out refusing to eat the healthy dinner in front of him.
On Saturday, it was a combination of laziness and disorganisation – I wanted to catch up with a friend at the pub, and my son pulled on his gumboots. I capitulated, and he happily sat there dipping his greasy chips in tomato sauce as we had a beer.
I can afford to feed my kid, and it’s still not easy. Sometimes I think I should peel his grapes, puree his broccoli with mango and whittle his carrots into adorable bite-sized unicorns, and then I realise I am too tired and he’d probably just yell ‘‘but I wanted a HORSE mummy’’ anyway.
We are constantly being told this country is in the grip of an obesity epidemic, with its attendant poorer health outcomes. We also know there are about 300,000 kids living in houses with incomes below the poverty line, where food is scarce. We are aware junk food is cheap and aggressively marketed, making it attractive to the time and resource poor.
But I still don’t think we really get it, because we are obsessed with telling people what they should eat, and how they should be raising their kids. Don’t for a minute think these messages are meant for middle-class parents; these parents can drop their kids to school in their four-wheel-drives and let them munch on Cheezels and play on an iPad all day without recrimination. These parents are above reproach.
But if you’re poor, look out! The food and exercise police are here. It’s your fault, parents, if your kids are fat or lazy or malnourished. The complexity of your lives, environment, and cultural background doesn’t matter.
You must stay up into the early hours of the morning once you’ve returned home from your third job, cooking a nutritious meal using just one lettuce leaf, 1kg of mince and a pinch of cumin, coming in at a bargain $3.31 per serve.
See! Much cheaper than pizza and you can 100 per cent guarantee your children will love it and it won’t have been a gigantic waste of time that you don’t have.
But, remember, even if you do this, it’s still your fault. ‘‘It’s quite common for the women who I work with to go without food to feed their kids,’’ says Jackie Clark, who runs South Auckland charity The Aunties, working with about 300 women a year.
‘‘I would say 80 per cent of them are extraordinary cooks and their kids get really good, nutritious food. But people don’t want to know about that, this is just about punishing people who are under-resourced,’’ she says.
‘‘There are all these assumptions made by people don’t know what it is to be hungry, what it is to have a car that doesn’t work, or to be five years old and walking to school with no shoes. I guarantee you all the children of the women I work with walk to school.’’
If we really cared about ensuring all the kids in this country were eating and drinking well, there are things that could be done that do not include ragging on the poor. An Otago University study earlier this year found only 20 per cent of children’s playgrounds in the North Island had working water fountains, a figure that drops to 6 per cent in Wellington and Auckland. How hard can it be to provide children with access to fresh water?
Imagine if we went a step further than just making sure kids could have a drink at the park, and provided healthy school lunches for all children, like many countries in Europe and Japan. Or introduced a tax on sugary drinks, which has been proven to work elsewhere. Or actively calmed and diverted traffic around schools so that parents felt safe about their kids walking or biking.
Maybe we should start talking about malnutrition alongside obesity, since they are often intertwined.
Yeah, nah. It’s much easier to just point the finger at individuals. Sort it out, losers.