The hon. member has obviously never had the cooking of my father, otherwise she would refrain from making such comments. In fact, if the hon. member talked to my daughters she could hear the disparaging things they say about me bringing home food in a bag on Fridays, food that has already been cooked. But I digress, and I wish I had not been not thrown off my topic.
What I would like to say, though, is that we are seeing a deskilling throughout our communities. It is a terrible deskilling because children going to school are bringing processed foods with them every day. They are drinking Coke for breakfast. We see it even in rural communities where one would think that the old traditions of the daily meals would stand. Instead what we are seeing is a continual reliance on these kinds of manufactured foods and it is having a devastating health impact. It is affecting our children.
I think it speaks to a major cultural shift, because we think of food as a central part of our culture. It is not just health. It is who we are. It is the history of where we are as a people.
If we look through the Bible we see that meals are the central focus of so many of the important events, from the Passover to the feeding of the 5,000. Where we would be in the western world if the apostles had the last supper in a drive-through at Tim Hortons because they were late trying to get to Jerusalem? We would be left without.
I am saying this in dead seriousness, because on top of the deskilling we are seeing in our culture, we are seeing an increasing speed in our culture, so there is the inability to get home and cook because people are working longer hours or people are away. I know myself, because I pretty much live in my car these days, that when it is my turn to cook I am more inclined to buy something that has been precooked, which is not necessarily a good thing.
What we are seeing is that families do not eat properly. Especially we are seeing that children do not eat properly. I think when we talk about food choice we have to think about children because they are the ones who are being affected. I would like to talk a little about these health effects.
Are you signalling that I am down to one minute? Oh, Mr. Speaker, I was just getting started. I will skip over most of what I had to say here.
I think that the issue of where we are going is very important. I share the concerns of our members across the floor about choice, about how if we bring in this rule does it mean we are going to bring in that rule? I do personally share that concern, because I have a problem wearing a helmet when I ride a bicycle. That is probably why I do not ride bicycles.
But what I do see is that we have had major changes. When we had the discussions about getting rid of lead in gasoline, people said all kinds of jobs would be lost, but we got rid of it. We got rid of CFCs and aerosol sprays and we were better for it. We got rid of red dye number two. There are certain times when as legislators we are called to move forward and say, “Yes, this is in the interests of the general health and this in the interests of our children”.
I think that together we will be able to bring this forward without unduly impacting the industry and agriculture of our districts.