Why Affordability Must Be Part of Food Literacy Food literacy only works if families can afford real food. We can teach children to grow, cook and preserve food but those skills become meaningless if the ingredients they need are out of reach. Right now, many families are being priced out of real food and pushed toward ultra‑processed foods (UPFs) because the system makes convenience the cheapest option. This article explores why real food feels expensive, why UPFs dominate family budgets and why affordability must be part of any conversation about rebuilding food literacy. The Reality Families Aren’t Choosing UPFs – They Are Cornered Into Them Ultra‑processed foods aren’t…

Why UPFs Are Cheaper Than Real Food and Why That Must Change One of the biggest barriers to food literacy is cost £££ We can teach children to grow, cook and preserve food, but those skills only become meaningful if families can afford real ingredients and right now, many can’t. Ultra processed foods (UPFs) are cheaper, faster, and more accessible than real food, not because they are better, but because the system is designed that way. This article explains why UPFs are cheaper, how the food system makes real food unaffordable and why affordability must be part of any conversation about food literacy. UPFs Are Engineered to Be…

Why Children Do Not Know Where Their Food Comes From Food literacy isn’t just about cooking, growing or preserving. It is also about understanding the origin of food — how it’s grown, reared, harvested and produced. Yet today, millions of children grow up with no real connection to food beyond what they see on supermarket shelves. This divide isn’t accidental. It’s the result of a widening gap between rural and urban experiences. A gap that has grown across three generations and now shapes how children understand food, health, and the world around them. This article explores why the rural–urban divide matters, how it developed and why bridging it…

Why families can not teach what they have never been taught Food literacy is often spoken about as something that should be taught at home – passed down through generations – – shared in kitchens – gardens – everyday life – In an ideal world, it would be but we are no longer living in the world our grandparents grew up in. The chain of knowledge has been broken. Today’s parents are raising children in a food system that looks nothing like the one they were raised in. Many never learned to cook from scratch, never grew food, never preserved seasonal produce and never saw real ingredients used…

How We Lost Our Connection to Real Food Over the last fifty years, Britain has undergone one of the most dramatic shifts in food culture in human history. In just three generations, we’ve moved from a society where most families cooked from scratch, grew something at home, and preserved seasonal produce — to one where ultra processed foods dominate diets, shopping baskets, and children’s understanding of what food even is. This didn’t happen overnight. It happened slowly, quietly, and systematically. Unless we understand how we got here, we cannot rebuild the food literacy our children desperately need. This is the first article in our Food Literacy Series. Exploring…

Rooted in Real Food Why Growing, Cooking & Preserving must be taught throughout the school years. We are now several generations deep into convenience culture, a world shaped by ultra processed foods, ready meals and a growing disconnect from where real food comes from. Many children leave school knowing how to analyse a poem or solve an equation, yet have no idea how to grow a carrot, cook a simple meal or preserve food for later. Some of us were fortunate enough to grow up with glimpses of real food skills woven into everyday life, gardening, cooking from scratch or being around farming and rural environments. However, that…