So I was talking with a friend tonight and started to brainstorm about how I would deal with the issues of smoking, drinking and over-eating and the burden the pose to the NHS. It's not old news that some are attempting to weasel out of treating the sick and so I wondered in this climate how you could perhaps work a fair system.

The National Farmers' Union conference has been held this week, and all parties have taken the opportunity to try and win favours with the crowd. Unfortunately for Labour it would appear that Hillary Ben didn't go down so well, while Cameron appeared to talk the good talk, and Nick Clegg will address with a similar message today. Supermarkets must be wondering what they've done to incur all this ire at one moment in time, first suggestions that they will need to sell off land they own to allow competition to thrive now at least two of the big party leaders slamming them for unethical practice and eroding British farming.

The next episode of Politalks is now here, with thanks to Gavin Whenman who will for the foreseeable future be partnering me on the project. Video below is probably NSFW!

Once upon a time I was in secondary school and had to do cookery lessons with everyone else as part of a revolving door scheme of design and technology work. This meant that cooking was only taught for a fraction of the year but it was potentially valuable experience. I say potentially because my cookery lessons did nothing to teach me the very basics of what I needed to get along with ingredients in my own home. A few years later I went to university and had a trial by fire in truly learning how to cook. I feel that this is the reality for many going through "food technology" lessons, so I have to welcome the news today about cookery being made compulsory with mixed emotions

The move is a great start, and I'm happy that we're moving in the right direction, but it's not enough and it's coming about too late in the day to do this in any half measures (excuse the pun). We need independently devised menu's that are flexible to the cultural needs of individual schools, we need the funding to let those menu's, independently assessed to be the best broad learning for a child, be taught properly, and we need to stop perpetuating myths about the cost of food because of a standard line on "means testing". More importantly, with a lack of teachers trained to deliver this course, we need this kind of thinking realised quicker.

The final part of my analysis of the issues raised by the "Big food fight" season on Channel 4. We've had a fortnight of being absolutely blitzed with potentially new knowledge about the welfare of the animals we eat, the quality of the food we eat, the effect it has on our health and the debates about who holds responsibility for changing all of these for the better. Now, with "The Truth About Food (pt 2)" that issue of corporate and governmental responsibility, along with our own need for some more common sense, is truly fleshed out.

The next big program in the food fight season that I was able to see (I must admit I've yet to watch the dispatches documentary that will probably round up this series of blogs, and missed a program about an extreme diet) features 18 unhealthy eaters. These are people addicted to junk food, to pepsi, and even those that don't even eat vegetables...at all. The reasons are varied, from liking what they eat in terms of taste all the way down to one saying there's not enough time to eat anything else. Along side them will be Jamie Oliver with his team to try and wise them up, a doctor, nutritionist and Gunther von Hagens, that creepy looking guy that cuts up dead bodies. Today it will be one guy who was 25 stone at his death for the main course.

The program went in to the main areas of why junk food is bad; sugar, salt, lack of fibre, cholesterol and fat. These five areas will be looked at for why they are bad, how our 18 bad eaters are falling into bad habits, and also what the best way to avoid and potentially reverse the effects are. All in all the program was very interesting, and despite the multitude of things I've watched and read on the subject it was still able to teach me some things. I didn't quite buy in to the style but I know others would so I believe this is really essential viewing for the education of people on their habits. Below is my review.

Today (Friday) ended what will probably, or hopefully, be the biggest thing to happen on the politics of food since Jamies School Dinners finished airing the first time around. This time he wasn't the sole orchestrator but once again had his hands in, literally at times, making this issue of food quality apparent for all to see. Jamie's Fowl Dinners aired for an hour and a half and focused completely on the lives of chicken for both meat and egg production. Most of us watching had no doubt seen all the facts before about meat production but to add the facts about egg production was enlightening and essential to round off the picture about welfare of chicken in this country. Channel 4 also, surreptitiously, managed to kick start the next half of their "food fight" season with a short documentary that was, perhaps unintentionally, hilariously covering the lifestyles of "raw" diet eaters.

The last two episodes of Hugh's Chicken run ended on Wednesday and brought about a very sobering atmosphere and feeling of true reality. The series ended with the man himself declaring that while the people of Axminster had made a great start in to accepting free range as the standard, there was still a huge way for their Chicken Out! campaign to go. It was encouraging to see how readily some people took to the challenge put before them, but this was unfortunately outweighed by peoples vindictiveness towards the "rich" and irrational use of excuses (see my blog post below)

I shall be blogging with my review of the final two episodes of "Hugh's Chicken Run" soon, however first I wanted to break this particular issue that has near infuriated me about people featured on the show. The issue I talk about is the absolutely bollocks stance of the "poor" that they "cannot afford" to change their food shop to introduce better quality and more ethical foods. The show itself centres on free range chicken (a product in current terms £2.08 more expensive per kilo than standard), but we could be talking here about ethical foods such as fair trade coffee and banana's, or even simply better quality meat with a better slaughter that you're more likely to find at a butchers.

Today there was a story about advertising of "junk food" with some dappy woman on More4 news quite ideally and succinctly putting across the whole reason why such arguments are utter rubbish. She said, quite simply...

It's just not right is it?

Ok, so that may be a slight paraphrase on my behalf, but it is more or less there. This woman's whole argument came down to the point that she, and others like her, don't think it is "right" that "junk food" is advertised online to our kids or on TV at all. I think she needs to worry about the multitude of problems she probably has to contend with (as we all do, we all have problems) rather than sit around moaning about ours.