What’s wrong with full-fat milk? Plus healthy home-made cereal

Fat is well and truly back on the political agenda in the UK. We’d barely digested our Christmas pudding when graphic adverts appeared on the telly  showing us the ugly truth of how much sugar, fat and salt hides in everyday food. The Labour Party was close behind in the slipstream with a call for a cap on sugar in breakfast cereals to combat child obesity. Meanwhile, supermarkets geared up for this year’s rollout of a (contentious) “traffic light” food labelling system.
It’s all of particular interest to me as I’m working on a children’s recipe book designed to encourage kids to cook. It’s a tricky business. Ask any child what they like to cook and the answer invariably involves cake. That’s not to say kids these days don’t enjoy eating more “sophisticated” food. It’s just that most simply don’t have the precocious cooking ambitions of Junior Masterchef munchkins. Do the kids I know relish cooking veg or making salad? Not really. So while it’s right to include recipes in a children’s cook book that are nutritionally sound, it’s not so easy to devise healthy recipes that kids will trip over themselves to make. But it’s urgent that we find a way to get our children cooking.