Hands off the jam roly-poly: why banning puddings in school is a bad idea

I love the restaurant Caravan, notably its jalapeño corn bread, yet the owner, Laura Harper-Hinton, has said something with which I violently disagree: “I think schools should ban puddings. We have to tackle children’s attitude to sugar and we need a joined-up approach … Giving pudding after a main course is a travesty. I don’t know why anyone would think that was a good idea.”

It is true that one in three British children leave primary school overweight, and true that they consume too much sugar, with Public Health England announcing that, as of last Friday, they had already consumed all the sugar they ought to have eaten this year. It is true, of course, that if you were to light on one single ingredient in a child’s life that made them gain weight, it would likely be sugar. But it does not follow that you can turn sugar into a verboten substance in institutional life and that will make all the difference.

There is a tendency to site every problem, from bullying to sexism to diet, within the school environment because that’s a very comforting story, where you can pull a policy lever and it’s all fixed. There are, of course, elements of school life that contribute to obesity, the main one being that outdoor time has been de-prioritised in favour of hitting targets about fronted adverbials that most adults couldn’t meet. But the rise of obesity is essentially a story about food poverty: cheap food keeps its long shelf-life by means of sugar, struggling families have reduced choice because they cannot afford for their children to turn anything down, and the inexorable rise of the food bank has left many with no choice at all. A sponge pudding with custard on it is not the problem; the travesty is that a working parent might still not be able to afford groceries.

Cake has been at the centre of primary school social life for as long as anyone can remember, as it’s the only thing everyone can make that everyone also likes. An orthodoxy that makes pudding the enemy will just leave us all unorthodox.