The Big City

I was helping put out the food at the daughter’s school Christmas party yesterday. I found it a bit disturbing for several reasons.

The first thing that worried me was that I seemed to be the only person helping who washed his hands before handling the food. I’m no cleanliness fanatic, far from it in fact, but this did seem to be a rather obvious case for a bit of rudimentary hygiene. Parenting is a mucky business and the food we were putting out was going to be sitting at room temperature for at least an hour.

The next alarming thing was the pork. There are loads of Muslims at that school, as well as a few vegetarians and yet there was no plate on any table that didn’t contain sausages and sausage rolls, often heaped up against cakes, sandwiches and other foods. I mentioned it to one of the other helpers, a former teacher, and she didn’t think it was an issue at all. I think that religious food laws are simply insane but some people feel very strongly about them. Surely we should at least make an attempt to respect their views.

The worst thing though was the terrible quality of the food. There were a few token carrot sticks and chunks of cucumber but everything else was a series of variations on salt, sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil and flour. Not to mention the supporting cast of nasty additives. I saw virtually nothing that I would feed my children at home; most of it I wouldn’t eat myself. I got the impression that the people who contributed food had just bought the cheapest possible snacks they could find, maybe it was stuff that they wouldn’t normally give their children either. But surely a party should be an opportunity for fantastic, beautiful, exciting food, maybe delicacies that one normally wouldn’t indulge in. There’s simply no point in serving up a load of revolting junk, not really food at all, and in such quantities that most of it ends up in the bin anyway, which is where it belongs. What are we trying to teach our children - Eat well when you must but eat crap when you’re having fun?