Once upon a lunchtime

I was at the Oxford Real Farming Conference in January, sitting in a talk ( with Hodmedods, TastEd and Malika Basu)about pulses, school food, and the quiet revolution happening across the country.

Someone said, almost in passing, that “food is echoed in fairy tales.”

It lodged itself in my brain, I keep coming back to it.

Because of course it is.

Long before nutritional labels, procurement frameworks, and strategy documents, food lived inside stories. It appeared as breadcrumbs and beans, porridge and apples, feasts and famine. Food was never just food. It was a warning, a promise, a test, a gift.

Fairy tales were never really about witches or giants. They were about survival. About scarcity and sharing. About what happens when systems fail, and what happens when people care for one another.

Which makes me wonder whether fairy tales were, in fact, our earliest form of food education.

Take Hansel and Gretel.

Two children, a family with nothing left to give, a forest that swallows people whole. Hunger is the engine of the story. The gingerbread house — dazzling, sugary, irresistible — looks like abundance but conceals danger.

It doesn’t feel like a huge leap to see a modern version of that house in today’s brightly coloured, ultra-processed foods. Cheap calories. Clever marketing. Products engineered to hook young brains, while quietly eroding health.

Then, as now, the problem isn’t that children are greedy. The problem is that children are hungry (or their brains are made to think they are).

Hunger today wears different clothes. It's free school meal thresholds. Lunchboxes that don’t quite stretch to Friday. Children who eat but are not nourished.

In the fairy tale, survival comes through ingenuity, courage, and eventually, escape.

In real life, survival looks more like school kitchens, breakfast clubs, community growing spaces, and adults who refuse to accept that this is “just how things are”.

Then there’s Jack and the Beanstalk.

Jack trades something solid for a handful of beans. Everyone tells him he’s foolish. But those beans grow into a ladder between worlds.

It’s a story about seeds.

About believing small things matter.

About growth happening quietly, underground, before anyone sees it.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped teaching children that food begins with seeds. Many now genuinely believe food starts at the supermarket. Not because they’re careless, but because we’ve built a world where that’s largely true.

When children plant seeds in a school garden, something shifts.

They learn that food takes time. That soil is alive. That patience is part of nourishment.

They learn that growth isn’t instant, but it is dependable.

In a world facing soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate instability, this isn’t a quaint hobby. It’s literacy.

Then there’s Cinderella.

Cinderella works in the kitchen, but she doesn’t get to feast. She prepares food, serves food, and survives on scraps while others dine upstairs.

Food mirrors power.

Who eats well.Who eats last.Who eats at all.

It’s uncomfortable how little has changed.

Many of the people who grow, harvest, process, and serve our food struggle to afford good food themselves.

Many children eat in rushed, noisy spaces, disconnected from who cooked their meal, or why it looks the way it does. Food becomes transactional. Fuel. Something to get through.

Not something to belong to.

But when children help cook.When they eat together.When they know the names of ingredients.When they recognise herbs growing outside their classroom.

Food becomes relational again. It becomes care.

This is what keeps niggling me. Fairy tales carried big truths in small packages.

They taught children:

Be careful what you trust.Small actions can change everything.Greed has consequences.Sharing saves lives.

They didn’t separate food from story, from ethics, from ecology, from community.

We’ve turned food education into nutrients, percentages, and individual choice, while quietly removing the time, space, and infrastructure that make good choices possible.

At the same time, we are standing at the edge of multiple, overlapping crises:

Rising food poverty.An ageing farming population.Climate volatility.Fragile supply chains.Public health under strain.

None of these are separate.

They are all food stories.

And yet, in schools, food is often treated as an optional extra.

A club. A project. A nice-to-have.

What if it’s actually foundational?

What if growing, cooking, and eating together are not enrichment activities, but core learning?

What if school food isn’t just about feeding children today, but about shaping the kind of food system they will expect tomorrow?

Because children who learn that food is:

Grown, not manufactured.Shared, not hoarded.Valuable, not disposable.Connected to land, people, and place.

Grow into adults who design systems differently.

This isn’t about turning every child into a farmer.

It’s about turning every child into someone who understands that they are part of a web.

A food web.

Fairy tales always ended with a kind of restoration. A return to balance. A sense that things, though damaged, could be made right again.

Maybe that’s the thread worth picking up.

Not through grand gestures alone, but through thousands of small, ordinary acts:

Sowing Seeds, the bean on a windowsill.A shared meal.A compost heap.A story told at a shared lunchtime or breakfast club

Conversations had whilst cooking.

Once upon a time, food was how we taught children about the world.

Maybe it’s time we remembered that.

And started telling better stories again.