The longer the day the better . . .

And a longer school day will be so much better for kids’ meals. Instead of just controlling what kids eat (and don’t eat) for lunch, the nanny state’s food fascists will be able to control exactly what they eat for breakfast and dinner and afternoon snack time too.

Toast for breakfast will be acceptable – but dry only. Butter, after all, is the devil. It has fat and cholesterol. Cows are exploited. The carbon footprint from butter is bigger than Waikato and there’s salt in it. Butter is Beelzebub.

Marmite’s OK on the toast. It has vitamins. Mind you, Ribena used to have vitamins. And that shows how much we can trust filthy money-making suits and ties. Men. Corn flakes are probably out – all corn is GM which is also the devil. Marigolds are OK, dried and served with dandelion juice. (Who said “bacon, eggs, hash browns and black pudding”? You filthy heathen.)

Lunch of course is whole grain sandwiches, water cress, hydroponically grown carrots, lettuce, mung bean sprouts, celery, cucumber and swede sticks. Hydroponics is good because water is the elixir of life. Puha of course is both nutritious and culturally kapai. Hmm, would mutton be acceptable to the food fascists if cooked in a hangi? Or paua?

There’ll have to be an afternoon snack – low-fat milk, a handful of dried figs or prunes for obvious reasons and, assuming they’re organically-grown, apples, pears or plums. They have the lowest carbon-miles. Oh and wheat-grass – it’s the new miracle food.

And then there’s dinner. I think we can safely serve up our children (I think they’re more ‘ours’ now than ‘there’s’) a vegetable curry. Curry is educational you see. It triggers conversations about travel and the Indian Ocean and poverty and political issues and bioethics and elephants and Kathmandu and Tibet and the Ganges. Dinner over a curry can’t help but to be a learning opportunity. And of course curry’s cheap. We can’t expect to get extra money for these extra school hours.

Now, I reckon if we extend the school day just a wee bit more, we can also control what kids see on TV and do with the internet.Parents can have them back for the sleeping time. Perhaps we’ll send them to bed at age-appropriate bedtimes and parents can take them home and return them to school on stretchers. But who will ensure they have culturally – and ecologically – and morally-acceptable dreams? And who will ensure they sleep in environmentally-friendly bedding?

You do know how bad cotton is for the environment, don’t you? And you certainly don’t want teenage boys sleeping with woollen blankets.

— Peter Giddens