The pasty-faced Glaswegians may yet come to have sparkling complexions
The Scottish diet is often rated as the worst in Europe; and Glasgow's bad even by Scottish standards. Glaswegian tastes in food traditionally have run to grease, grease and more grease. Under the dull orange lighting of a Glasgow chippy, you will find countless heart-stopping delights, repugnant to the lily-livered English. Never mind the deep-fried Mars Bars of urban legend: here are scorching deep-fried haggis in batter with lurid curry sauce; deep-fried pizza; and deep-fried meat pies, fatty enough to put you straight in the cardiac ward. As a poster slogan has it: "Even the tatties have batter!"
But a new scheme to promote fruit-eating in schools just might begin to wipe the smug southern disdain off our faces. "Fruit Plus", which started in July 2002, is the largest healthy-eating initiative of its kind ever to be launched in the UK. A joint project between Glasgow City Council and NHS Greater Glasgow, it promises to give all state-educated children aged three to 12 free fruit, three times a week.
Unlike the Mayor of Hartlepool's ill-fated free bananas scheme (which I wrote about here on 13 January), "Fruit Plus" has, amazingly, actually fulfilled its pledges. Over a single year, the initiative will have distributed more than seven million pieces of fruit - green and red apples, pears, grapes and satsumas as well as bananas and other fruits in season - to 60,500 children.
The potential benefits are huge. "Fruit Plus" aims to use free fruit as a way of encouraging a "fruit-eating habit" among pupils that should extend to their home lives and continue into adulthood. The idea is that eating fruit three times a week should be enough to give children a permanent taste for it. The day may yet dawn when Glaswegians are known for their strong bones and sparkling complexions, when wholesome juice bars replace chippies in the Gorbals.
The success of "Fruit Plus" indicates that the debate on food in schools has become much more radical in Scotland than it is in England. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and perhaps it is because the Scots are now so often reminded of the poverty of their diet that they are - to a much greater extent than the more blinkered English - willing to contemplate political initiatives to improve it.
Last year, Tommy Sheridan MSP brought a bill before the Scottish Parliament proposing free school meals for all state-educated pupils. Although it was ultimately defeated, it pushed the question of improving food in Scottish schools to the forefront of political debate. Sheridan pointed out that the cost of obesity to the NHS in Scotland is £150m a year. Free school lunches for all children would cost only £174m a year, and, apart from bringing colossal health benefits, would remove the stigma that attaches to those who currently qualify for free meals. Its supporters - from five different parties - saw the bill as an investment in Scotland's future. "We don't means-test children to allow them access to schools, hospitals and libraries," argued Sheridan. "It's an absolute disgrace that we means-test children in relation to school meals."
Even though it rejected the bill, the Scottish Parliament's education committee has now recommended that the stigma of free school meals be addressed, possibly by using swipe cards; that free milk and free drinking water should be made available in schools; that the use of vending machines should be questioned and "the availability of commercial soft drinks should be discouraged". Above all, the committee insisted that nutritional standards for school meals should be set "around nutrient-based guidelines" and checked by a "robust level of monitoring". These recommendations go much further than anyone is willing to do in Westminster, where the Department for Education and Skills is forever abdicating responsibility for feeding our children, while boasting about giving the "power" to make these decisions to individual headteachers, who are in fact relatively powerless to do so.
Perhaps in 20 years' time, Scots will cross the border and regard our pasty nugget-eating young with the same patronising distaste we once felt on the streets of Glasgow.
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