Linda Hall: Get growing with little gardeners

Linda Hall, Assistant Editor, Hawke's Bay Today.

Yesterday was the final day of New World's Little Garden promotion.

And what a fantastic promotion it was. It was so good to see children getting excited about planting herbs and vegetables.

Hopefully there are thousands of children all over the country who have never had the chance to grow anything from seed, learning where healthy food comes from.

Hand's on learning is a much better way of teaching rather than just telling them carrots and broccoli are good for them and lollies and fizzy are not.

Perhaps this is what we need to be doing - giving children seeds to show them how easy it is to grow food.

With New Zealand in the grips of an obesity and diabetes educating our youngsters could well be a huge step in the right direction.

Of course parents have to come to the party as well. An therein lies a lot of the problem with obesity and diabetes in children.

Quite frankly the parents either can't be bothered cooking decent meals or they give in to demanding children who have no idea what their diet is doing to their bodies.

I simply don't believe the claim of some that it is cheaper to buy takeaways every night than to cook decent meals five or six night a week.

You don't have to serve steak. There are plenty of cheaper cuts of meat that make delicious meals. I think the people who say it's cheaper to buy takeaways maybe look at their finances in the wrong way. Perhaps they think that way because in their eyes they are only handing over $20 to $40 at a time depending on where the takeaways are coming from. Whereas if they do a shop for food that would last them the week they have to hand over a large amount of money at once.

There are others, I'm sure, that have never been taught how to cook so don't know the pleasure you get from seeing your family eating and enjoying something they have made from scratch.

Yes it can be tedious cooking meals night after night and thinking about "what's for dinner tonight" every day. But people have been doing it since the beginning of time and we sure have it a lot easier than our great-grandparents did.

Imagine how hard those women worked to feed huge families. Compared to them we have it pretty easy.

And the thing is children back then ate home baking all the time. Cakes and biscuits with the dreaded sugar in them.

They also moved a lot more than children today but that's not to say they can't have sugar.

All the experts say everything in moderation.

As Chelsea Winter said to me when I interviewed her about her new cookbook Scrumptious "we shouldn't be focusing on what we shouldn't eat but rather on what we do eat" - good advice.

In fact her book would be ideal for anyone wanting to try their hand in the kitchen. The recipes are simple and achievable.

So hopefully over this long weekend there will be lots of children transplanting their seedling into gardens or pots.

■ Linda Hall is assistant editor of Hawke's Bay Today.