Why Don't We Care What Children Eat?

I voyaged across the mists of time last week: on school-run duty again, ferrying my (grand) children five miles through the traffic, then hovering at the gate to pick them up. Back in the old routine. Waiting outside with the mums and a few dads: watching anxiously for two tiny figures in a sea of faces as the doors came open. And suddenly wondering, like Tony Blair, why all these kids were so happy and healthy. So damned slim.

Well, there was one glibly obvious answer to that. The mums at the gate were pretty toned themselves. They worked at it. That's the way they live their middle-class lives. Example, example. But then, out of interest, I looked at other gates in other parts of town - and saw much the same thing.

What had Leonardo and Georgina had for lunch? No need to ask, really. This is Barcelona, and they distribute their menus a month ahead. October's is propped on my terminal as I write. Today, at noon, they'll sit down to a three-course meal. Mixed salad with steamed beans and potatoes; grilled chicken; a natural yoghurt.

Tomorrow it's a different salad - ensalada lombardo - and different vegetables, then beef stew and fruit bought just hours before. And so on, day after day. Salads vichy and andaluza and dumas and catalana and flamenco and aurora. Lentils with ham, and paellas and spaghettis. Grilled hake and grilled steak and grilled lamb chops. Omelettes, and salmon freshly steamed. Calamari romana chopped and fried in the kitchen with fresh squid.

We're in the Mediterranean; here's the once and continuing Mediterranean diet. But we're also in a country which cares about the quality and freshness of the food it eats. Ask why those huge Spanish trawlers patrol the Atlantic, hoovering fish, and the answer's clear: because Spaniards eat more fish than any country in Europe, because they start eating it young.

Mr Blair, meanwhile, runs a country where one in 10 six-year-olds, and one in five 15-year-olds, is classed as obese. Welcome to fat-soaked junk. Welcome to diabetes, heart disease and the cancers of later life. Welcome to the western world's next waddling, panting version of America: the superpower of super paunches.

Now nobody - not even the government's Health Development Agency - supposes there's a single answer to this blubbery blight. New Labour, apparently, wants "more innovative and interventionist policies" which get exercise levels up for 70% of the population. Play sport, don't slump on a sofa and watch it. But, in the beginning of the problem, there is food: and, at the beginning of the beginning, there's a grisly comparison.

What's the average cash allowance for ingredients here per child per primary school lunch? Exactly 31 pence (G2 readers will remember some top chefs trying to make something of that the other day). But the whole proposition, when you stop to think about it, is ludicrous.

Come back to Barcelona for a moment. There are no pat comparisons between school systems British and Spanish: around 60% of Catalan schools, for instance, have some private provision to them. We're not talking Eton versus the Oliver Letwin memorial comprehensive, Lambeth. From top to bottom, too, the attitudes are different. Nobody wants or seeks to make a profit. If school meals at the top cost you €130 (£92) a month - and they can - every last cent goes into the ingredients. (The younger the mouths they feed, the better the steak.) The chef who buys the food has his instructions.

But, at the other end of the scale, the policy remains constant. There, the meals cost €80 (£57) or so a month and some corners are shaved. Vegetables, for instance, are prepared centrally and distributed for re-heating. Still, every school has to have a kitchen - and a grill. The chicken and the fish have to be grilled fresh, on the premises. The nutritional balance has to be kept.

Is there an alternative? Not sarnies and biscuits in the playground. They're out of order. Some schools in some areas will close from one till three so kids can go home for lunch - which is where other grandparents come in. But the emphasis, first to last, is on proper feeding; as a natural, unquestioned priority. What schools provide is a partnership.

Of course Spanish parents - like parents everywhere - have to go out to work and to juggle difficult hours. That's why your euros can buy two meals a day, not one. Small kids may have tea as well as lunch: bigger children get a big breakfast before lessons to start them off. School and home don't exist in isolation. There's a shared assumption that what children eat matters vitally. A family assumption which extends itself naturally into the classroom.

Where, though, is our shared assumption? Any swift look at attitudes across societies is bound to founder in generalisation, of course. I'm sure some Spanish schools aren't wonderful; I'm sure the National Healthy School Standard campaign is making progress here. No simplicities. Still, that starter for 31 pence remains. It says, fundamentally, that we don't care. It sets an automatic, off-hand value: less than a can of Coke or a Twix, much less than a lager on the TV couch.

I know that the problem of child and then adult obesity grows worse the nearer you come to poverty. I know that the poorer areas of our cities give most cause for concern. I know there are no magic formulas, no fantasy islands, no family traditions we can invent in a trice. I can imagine the instant howl here over Leonardo's €4 of hake, the new foamings from IDS.

But 31p's worth of sausage and slime, of burger and clog? That's a disgrace. And, since superfit Tony raises the question, a national disgrace, a school gate swinging shut.