As told to Laura Potter. Photograph Colin Bell
I grew up on biscuits for breakfast and deep-fried ish ingers. When you’re in a working class family with three small children, sometimes you’ll give them whatever they’ll eat – illing them up is what matters. We thought ish ingers were good, because they’re ish, but we fried them in oil, so any beneit we were getting was probably negated. All we needed to do was oven-cook them, which we did later. It wasn’t a deliberate intention, we just didn’t know any better.
A sugar tax punishes the poorest. I grew up in one of these families and I know that unless you make it easier and cheaper for people to buy healthier food, all you’re doing is penalising them for not knowing better or not being able to aford better quality food. If the cheapest food becomes more and more expensive, the result is that people just won’t eat enough.