JAMIE Oliver has blamed Britain's obesity crisis on working mothers being too busy to pass on cooking advice to their families.
The TV chef warned that the UK would end up like America in a decade unless radical action was taken to improve diets, and he called for a £6 billion investment in school meals and cookery lessons.
He praised Scotland for offering free school meal
s to primary school pupils in their first three years, a policy that goes nationwide in 2010 after a successful trial in five councils.
But he warned that making meals free for all children could lead to the service becoming cash-starved in the long run.
Oliver, who was giving evidence to a Commons inquiry into health inequalities, said the UK government had been happy to reap the tax paid by working women, but had failed to reinvest it in teaching cooking skills that children would traditionally have learned from a stay-at-home mother.
He said: "Over the last 40 years our girls have gone to work. They used to be the key holders of a lot of this knowledge. I believe that the girls of Great Britain have been done a disservice. That tax that has been taken off our girls has not been put back into teaching our kids."
Speaking afterwards, he said: "The obesity problem is an epidemic. If we don't deal with it in the next 10 years, it will be 10 times harder to fix. It will be a horror show."
He said Scotland had been a "pioneer" in dealing with food problems and called for its school meals policy to be implemented south of the Border. "I think what Scotland is doing about giving free school meals for primary school kids is a very good idea," he said.
Since he first highlighted the problem of poor quality school meals on the TV programme Jamie's School Dinners, the Westminster government has invested £650 million in pupils' food in England. But Oliver said this was merely window-dressing and called for the investment to increase ten-fold.
He also called for better training of school cooks, who he said were brilliant but demoralised, and cooking lessons on the national curriculum.
"Health, obesity and education has been a struggle to be taken seriously for 10 years," he said. "I think it's a bloody emergency."
WHAT NEXT CHILDREN'S charities yesterday backed SNP plans to provide free meals for primary pupils.
Giving evidence to the Holyrood Education Committee, the charities called on MSPs to support a parliamentary order which will pave the way for free school meals for every child in P1, P2 and P3 in Scotland.
SNP ministers say extra finance has been allocated to allow councils to meet the commitment.
