Jamie Oliver has had some success transforming the way UK schools feed our children and now he wants to show the US how to feed their children. Jamie’s got his bad points but he’s pretty much a hero in my opinion. OK, so we might see him as being in the pocket of the big supermarkets but his heart is undoubtedly in the right place. If Jamie can persuade people that children can and do like vegetables then he will have done well.

I’m not at all sure how we reached this place where it’s just assumed that children don’t like veg. It seems quite strange to me, I always had more trouble getting them to eat meat! I suppose I was dealing with children who had mostly started off as vegetarian and been weaned onto vegetable solids. My bible was Rose Elliot’s Vegetarian Mother and Baby, I’d read Let’s Have Healthy Children (out of print and not that accurate) and I had a few tricks up my sleeve. Veggies make great weaning finger foods (carrots are obvious but try sticks of celariac or fennel!), mashed avacado is just about a perfect weaning food, and once they are a little bit older salad or pizza faces that they decorate themselves will usually be demolished in double quick time.

Vegetable box

Anyway, listen to what Jamie has to say and then take another look at what came in this week’s vegetable box and see what you can do to make it attractive to your kids. If you are stuck for ideas just leave a comment and I’ll try to come up with something.

Louise Fresco presents at a TED talk on the subject of “Feeding the Whole World” in praise of technology, science and mass produced industrial food.

“Never before has our food been made by so few of us. And never before has it been taken so much for granted.”

( Hat tip to Josien Kapma for the video )

Louise Fresco, Dutch Academic, tells the Californians that holding a preference for wholemeal organic bread and despising mass produced white bread is a luxury for the rich, and not practical for the third world’s poor workers and farmers. So does she have a point?

Slowly but surely the demand for organic veg is on the increase. Every time there’s another animal food scare in the news another group of enlightened people decide that enough is enough and resolve to change the quality of their family’s food intake for good.

The latest one is Irish pork. News just breaking is that all of the republic’s pork products have been recalled:

All Irish Pork Products Recalled

All pork products made and sold in the Irish Republic since September have been recalled over fears they are contaminated with toxins.

BBC News 6 December 2008

The FSAE seem to have acted fairly quickly to take the necessary action:

Laboratory results of animal feed and pork fat samples obtained this afternoon (6 December) have confirmed the presence of dioxins. The food industry is therefore required to recall from the market all Irish pork products produced from pigs slaughtered in Ireland.

Food Safety Authority of Ireland

But behind the headlines there’s also this worrying concern about Irish Beef too:

In a news conference, led by the Minister for Agriculture Brendan Smith and the Minister for Health Mary Harney, it was also announced that 38 beef farms are also being investigated and movement from all affected farms is now restricted.

The recall has been backdated to September 1st.

Belfast Telegraph

It’s a disaster for the pig industry in Ireland as well as for the health of people in Ireland, the UK and anywhere else that has been importing Irish pork products. Between April and July this year, the UK imported 230,000 tonnes of pork and bacon from markets including the Irish Republic but it is unknown exactly how much of that was at risk of having been contaminated with the toxic PCB substances. Organic pigs will have been fed on organic pig food rather than industrial waste so the risk there is minimal, but the movement marches onwards towards including more organic veg as part of either a vegetarian, vegan or omnivorous lifestyle choice.