[Margaret Pilkington]

Jamie Oliver is persuasive and charismatic....and he is passionate about food. Butlike many other people he fails to see that the obesity problem isn't one that has just one cause.......it isn't about food. It is about balance. A balanced lifestyle.

I grew up just after the war we were very poor.......I'm talking really poor. No food in the house, no coal to keep us warm. Fruit came in tins and was reserved for Sunday with a splash of Carnation(if you were lucky) Oh, yes we did scrump apples from time to time

As children, we got school meals, which Ma paid for for a long time...then when my father was very ill and couldn't work we became eligible for free school meals.
Five days a week we got a good meal at lunchtime....but much of the rest of the time I wouldn't consider what we ate to be even vaguely healthy(jam and bread for tea...mixed fruit jam from the Co-op, cheapest you could buy, flavour...red).
We weren't fat.......why is that do you think? We should have been fat, our staple diet was bread and spuds....but we were not fat.

We played out, we ran around from morning til night....only going home for something to eat( a conny-onny butty).....we played whip and top, we skipped with ropes, we climbed trees, made dens, played Tig, hide and seek.
TV didn't come into our lives until 1952/3....and broadcasts were for a few hours in the evening. No computers......we led very active lives.

We didn't eat Greggs sausage rolls while walking round town we didn't have cans and cans of fizzy drinks.
What we ate was burned off in energy. Do you get the picture?

Perhaps I should have made this my blog.