The debate over junk food and childrearing continues in Britain. I have commented in previous posts about healthy eating and Jamie Oliver's new TV series 'Return to School Dinners.' Here's some more food for thought:

Junk culture killing childhood, experts warn
Helen Mooney, Tuesday September 12, 2006 EducationGuardian.co.uk

British children are being "poisoned" by a culture of processed food, computer games and over-competitive education, a group of academics and authors claimed today.
In an open letter to the Daily Telegraph, 110 teachers, psychologists and children's authors have called on the government to prevent the death of childhood.
The authors of the letter - who include children's writers Philip Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson, the former children's laureate Michael Morpurgo and the director of the Royal Institution, Baroness Greenfield - warn that children need to develop as human beings.
"Since children's brains are still developing, they cannot adjust as full-grown adults can, to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change," the letter says.
"They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to 'junk'), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives," they write.
The experts condemn Britain's increasingly "target-driven" education system and urge the government to recognise children's need for more time and space to develop, demanding an urgent public debate on child rearing in the 21st century.
"They also need time. In a fast-moving, hyper-competitive culture, today's children are expected to cope with an ever earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum," they say.
Mr Morpurgo said there was a "drip, drip, drip effect" of academic pressure and marketing which was killing childhood.
"It's gradually soaking like a poison into the culture," he said. "There is less room for reading, for dreaming, for music, for drama, for art, and simply for playing."
The letter was circulated by Sue Palmer, an ex-headteacher and author of the book Toxic Childhood, and Richard House, a senior lecturer at the research centre for therapeutic education at Roehampton University in London.
"Children's development is being drastically affected by the kind of world they are brought up in," Ms Palmer told the Daily Telegraph. "It is shocking."
"A child's physical and psychological growth cannot be accelerated. It changes in biological time, not at electrical speed. Childhood is not a race."

Personally I agree that we need to give children a more holistic, healthy, creative childhood. There has been debate already over this letter to the Daily Telegraph - read some comments here.