Well past the half million and counting!

Today the FishFight campaign signatures sailed past the half million mark. The downside of all the publicity is that Channel 4s fishy week has brought to the attention of the public at large a whole host of issues - not all directly related to the more local concerns of quotas and discards that have great consequences for the fleet should future controls be born of sentiment and not sense.

While many viewers may have found the scenes from last night's Gordon Ramsay shark fest which investigated the finning of sharks for shark fin soup somewhat gory - the truth of the matter is that slaughtering animals - be they fish, foul or beast hardly makes for palatable tea-time TV - but that is what goes on the whole world over in order to provide protein for much of the population.

Today, Education and the National Curriclum does not help students to engage with food either -in schools today cookery lessons have now been replaced with 'Design and Food Technology' - dissociated from getting your hands dirty and about as far removed from the real world of cake making, baking, roasting, mincing, chopping and preparing food for the table as it gets - instead students are fed a text of terms and processes more akin to the production manual you might imagine guided the staff of any multi-national food factory production line churning out cakes, sausages of meat pies by the million. 

A sanitised curriculum won't help future generations be objective about the life and death of livestock or fish for human consumption - especially when many recent school initiatives have been sponsored by the huge multi-nationals that rule our supermarket shelves - just look up Nestlé and their part in sales of baby milk powder in third world countries over the most natural of feeding process's enjoyed by the offspring of every single one of the world's mammals - its mother's milk.

Here's the kind of resources made available to the teaching world in support of today's curriculum - maybe, just maybe it would be better if the focus was on knowing, understanding, selecting, preparing and cooking real food to such an extent that kids made their own choices based on first hand experience so that teachers did not feel it necessary to be spend time addressing the negativee aspects of our eating habits and consumerism.