Why parents are back to cooking from scratch

Ready meals may be filling the supermarket shelves, but British parents are turning their backs on convenience food, preferring instead to get back to basics and cook themselves.

Over 2500 parents took part in Raisingkids.co.uk's 2007 Back To The Table survey and the story they've painted shows that parents are going all out to ensure their children eat well as well as enjoying food.

70% of the parents surveyed said they made their own pasta sauce. More than half had baked their own bread, 62% had started burgers from scratch and 68% of parents had made their child's birthday cake themselves.

Nearly half of those surveyed (47%) said they loved to cook and were always experimenting with new dishes. 61% said they were much more interested in food than their mothers had been.

Lest this all sounds too rosy, nearly four out of ten parents agreed with the statement ‘I am quite a good cook but I would prefer to be doing something else.’ A small group of 7% said they didn't like cooking at all.

'The proliferation of cookery programmes, the concern about childhood obesity and worries over food additives have pushed food to the top of the parenting agenda,' comments Raisingkids.co.uk's founder Dr Pat Spoungin. 'A generation ago, cooking was a chore and food was fuel. Now what we cook for our kids is a statement about how we parent today.'

• Click here for the full Back To The Table survey report
  
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