A healthier lifestyle

Oct 22 2007 by Larry Neild, Liverpool Daily Post

A healthier lifestyle

WASHING cabbage as a child, I would squeal if I spotted a creepy-crawly caterpillar marching across the leaves. I’m not eating that – the cabbage not the insect – I would remonstrate to my mother as we prepared Sunday dinner.

Now I am more worried that I never see crawlies munching their way through the food I am going to eat. In the process, I learned to cook, as well as iron clothes, stitch and sew.

A few days ago, a health commission I sit on published an interim report. We are trying to find out why so many Merseysiders are unhealthy.

It’s not as though there is no access to fresh food. It’s just that too many of us prepare meals cooked on a food-to-go basis, the American expression that simply means takeaway.

One of my office friends said to me, maybe people simply prefer junk food because it’s tasty. Seems people need a stoic determination to tug into a bowl of salad, raw vegetables and tofu. A fellow commissioner reasons chicken nuggets served with boiled pasta with tinned tomatoes provide a family meal for the fraction of the cost of a bingo game.

So why are we munching our way to an early grave? Is it because we carry a chip (sorry, no pun intended) on our shoulders?

I think it is because many people don’t know or have simply forgotten how to cook healthy food. Indeed, many homes don’t even have a dining table these days.

I suspect we don’t value ourselves enough, so we bombard our bodies with low quality food.

Isn’t it time we went back to basics and started teaching lifestyles in our schools? Cookery classes for boys and girls, as well as nutrition and money management.

When I left home, I bought myself a copy of Mrs Beaton’s Book of Household Management. I skipped the chapters about how to treat the servants and I never got round to trying the Sheep’s Head Broth. But I learned a lot from it.

We can blame high unemployment, poor housing, blighted communities, drugs and crime. But isn’t that all the more reason to think about a healthier lifestyle?

Today’s emerging generation has inherited years of entrenched poverty, going back three or four generations. This, in turn, creates a poverty of ambition, as the lifeblood is sucked out of many of us.

Our only hope is that our education system will come to the rescue and start to point our young people in the right direction. But there seems a fat chance of that happening: just the other day, I saw a group of smart, uniformed pupils in St John’s Gardens munching their way through packed lunches. Salad sandwiches? Fresh fruit juices? No chance, we are talking salt ’n’ vinegar crisps, choccie biscuits and cola drinks. Health is Wealth is our clarion call, but it seems far too many of are starved of both health and wealth.