For various reasons, not least worries about obesity, it is fashionable to decry the idea that today’s children no longer understand where food comes from, nor do they have any basic understanding about food & nutrition, or about how to cook a meal from basic ingredients.
Whilst I do of course share these concerns to some extent - I have even fantasised about running a cookery course for small children - we need to be careful about joining in with an over idealistic view of the past or with a Germanic romanticism about Green issues.
The sort of person who invites us to worry about the fact that children do not know that leeks are pulled out of the ground as mud covered objects of varying sizes, not as neatly trimmed green & white sticks wrapped in plastic, or that chicken nuggets start out as the flesh of tortured battery animals, or that steaks start out as the haunch of a magnificent beef bull, or that milk comes from the udder of a cow, not naturally from a bottle …
Such people rarely invite us to worry about the fact that those same children do not appreciate that the aluminium foil, in which we bake that healthy salmon or rainbow trout, that bright shiny foil which comes in such a convenient roll, actually starts out as a kind of red mud. Or where anything else manufactured 'comes from.' Or that electricity does not somehow live by magic in a socket.
