Hold the nuggets: children and adults should be eating together | Afua Hirsch

It’s not valued in our individualistic culture. But there’s a simple way to break Britain’s bad-food habit

There is a scene in my daughter’s favourite cartoon, The Amazing World of Gumball, where the two main characters are in their school canteen, eating food that is completely fluorescent – even by their usual US high school standards. “Dude, I think they put so many additives in my food, they forgot to add the actual food,” one says, before taking a bite and proceeding to turn a radioactive green. My daughter, like most other seven-year-olds I know, finds this side-splittingly funny. From a parent’s viewpoint, it’s less amusing.

A photo gallery of school lunches from around the world a couple of years ago revealed what many of us know, anecdotally, to be true. While Brazil offers rice and beans and fried plantain with a green burst of fresh leaves, the US and Britain stand apart, offering processed meat, too much carbohydrate and too little or even no fresh fruit and vegetables, with tinned fruit or baked beans instead.

Related: We’re in a new age of obesity. How did it happen? You’d be surprised | George Monbiot

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