When I was at senior school, in the early 1960s, we had school dinners that were of variable quality but generally pretty good.

Two major differences to today though: 1. You had two choices – eat it or leave it.

2. Processed food usually meant tinned peas. The good thing about this was that it made you at least taste most things – even if only to rid the pangs of hunger – and led to more people having much fewer food dislikes than today.

Home life also worked on the same principle, with the added incentive “if you don’t finish your dinner, you don’t get pudding”.

Vegetarianism was an unknown quantity, imported from the United States in the flower-power days and linked more to the users of mind-bending concoctions than a healthy diet – until someone saw a profit to be made in it, of course.

With this in mind I was fascinated by Jamie Oliver’s Channel 4 TV programme – Jamie’s American Food Revolution – about his attempts to change the diet of the US town of Huntingdon, considered the unhealthiest town in the US, where children didn’t recognise raw vegetables, where schools served up pizza for breakfast and children were growing up unable to use a knife and fork.

Are we heading this way?

Well, some people certainly are.

For me, parents who can’t cook from scratch are a danger to children.

But authorities that back up a processed diet regime that is shortening the lives of children should be imprisoned.

Mick Heavey Oxford Road Old Marston Oxford