Dangerous foods in nurseries

By George Tyndale on Oct 23, 08 11:00 AM

Over 600,000 children in England and Wales go to nursery for up to ten hours a day.

A report into what they eat there has revealed some alarming findings. Tens of thousands of the toddlers are being crammed with junk food that is actually banned in schools. Some establishments spend as little as 25p per child on the meals eaten throughout the day.

According to the organic campaign group the Soil Association, which commissioned the report, what our youngest citizens are surviving on is "unhealthy, highly processed and potentially dangerous".

This is of course a scandal. And it is blindingly obvious that nurseries should have been included in the guidelines which are supposed to be combating poor health and obesity in our schools.

But this is the second worrying insight into life in nurseries that we have been offered in the space of a few months. The last one, from Ofsted, revealed that almost 700 nurseries were "inadequate".

But these remain details. Here we have well over half a million children who are being brought up in mini-communes by strangers, deprived of any real family life and certainly banished from the love and understanding of their mothers and fathers.

The fact that they are being fed junk and not given the level of care and stimulation they need is scandalous.

But the big question remains unanswered -should we be inflicting such a start in life on hundreds of thousands of children at all?