Jam sandwiches

Back in the day, we got jam sandwiches and we were grateful.

Sigh. I’ve been watching the intergenerational debate play out over school lunches. My first set of musings is here. This is the second set.

There’s been a bunch of advice from everyday people, many of whom are older and whose kids aren’t kids anymore. This advice tends to go along the lines that children should learn to eat what they’re given, like we used to. If they get hungry enough, they’ll stop being fussy. I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly what’s wrong with this. After all, I would’ve eaten today’s school lunches quite happily.

Food isn’t just a thing you put in your mouth to stay alive. It’s social, economic, emotional, political and cultural - all forces that don’t stand still.

To be fair, there are aspects of back in the day that were probably better than now. As a kid, my diet was unvaried, but there was fruit and veggies, and relatively low sugar, salt and fat. Partly due to diet, I’ve grown up with good health, including good dental health. And food waste was negligible. Can’t we just go back to childhoods like mine?

I think our society’s changed in ways that make back in the day diets harder to attain. My school lunches and other meals were made from scratch by a mum who had time, because she stayed at home: a situation that’s now unaffordable for most families. Relative prices were different, making processed food or junkfood a treat for special occasions. And even if I’d lived near a shop, it would’ve been closed: trading was ferociously restricted. There was no midnight Maccas run. In fact, through much of the country, there was no Maccas.

The conditions under which we buy and make food have changed. But so has the food itself.

It’s pretty common to observe that everything these days is filled with sugar, salt, fat, preservatives, colouring, you name it. Food is designed to go straight to the pleasure centres of our brains.1 Once your pleasure centre is activated, within an environment that foists pleasurable foods on you 24/7, going back to foods that offer no enjoyment is way harder. That’s true both for kids and grown-ups. I know adults who subsist on less-than-healthy food as well, and I get it.

Our back in the day jam sandwich diet worked because there was no choice. Do you know how many jam sandwiches I’ve eaten since I got old enough to decide my own diet? It’s zero. And I bet it’s a similar number for the adults giving jam sandwich advice.

But let’s put all that aside. Say we magicked away all these factors that make it hard to attain our back in the day diets. Would we actually want to?

One day, at primary school, I opened my lunchbox to yet another jam sandwich, and it turned my stomach. When I thought no one was looking, I threw it into the rubbish bin. The teacher caught me, and she made me reach past the wasps, retrieve the sandwich and eat it. I didn’t dare not to. It would have meant defying an adult - and if I’d simply taken the jam sandwich home uneaten, I would’ve got in trouble for that too. (My brother was a bit less rulebound and chucked his jam sandwiches over the fence to the neighbour’s pigs, while walking home after getting off the school bus.)

For at least some people, our culture around food back in the day was punitive. Eat what you’re given. Doesn’t matter if you’re full: get on with it. You’ll sit at that damn table until you’re done. It took what are meant to be the good things away from kai: the comfort, the enjoyment, the gratitude, the spending positive time together as whānau. For plenty of people, that punitive culture around food was simply unpleasant. For some of our neurodiverse whānau - many of whom we didn’t yet recognise as neurodiverse, even as they balked at tastes and textures and smells - it must have been a misery. You can’t blame a generation of parents who don’t want to do this to their own kids.

I want to make a final point. We don’t talk about this, but for a lot of people, our modern culture around food is tied up with a sense of failure. In my case, it wasn’t so much about money, but time and skill. Both parents in our whare worked, because that’s what you have to do if you want to own a home - and that generally meant my kids got processed school lunches followed by hasty dinners, often takeaways.

It went to the heart of how I felt about myself as a mother, knowing we were doing our best as a whānau, yet not quite being good enough. The mum I wanted to be was better than that, and I missed my chance to be her. I was busy getting by - but for what our family lacked in nutrition, I hope we learned a little compassion.

Spare me both the advice and the jam sandwiches. Whether we like it or not, this is the world we made. We can’t starve our kids back into a nostalgic era that’s been and gone. All we can do is support them, and their parents, in the here and now.

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