The obesity crisis was fuelled by feminism, a senior food policy adviser and founder of a feminist magazine has said.
Rosie Boycott said that the encouragement of women to enter the workplace rather than become housewives resulted in everyone giving up cooking.
The mayor of London’s food adviser said that there was now a “lost generation” of people who relied on fast food and processed dinners.
Ms Boycott said she felt “partly responsible”, having co-founded the seminal feminist magazine Spare Rib in 1971. “I said ‘don’t cook, don’t type. You’ll get ahead.’ We lost it. Schools gave up cooking. Everyone gave up cooking.”
Asked at the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts if the obesity crisis was an unintended consequence of feminism, she said: “It’s certainly been fuelled by the fact women work and that we have changed things and we have allowed this huge change to happen.”
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The NHS acknowledges that there are fears the UK has become the “fat man of Europe”, with figures suggesting that one in four adults is obese.
Obesity levels have more than trebled in the past 30 years with estimates now suggesting that half the population could be obese by 2050.
The consequences, including diabetes, heart disease and cancer, have put an increasing strain on NHS budgets. It has been blamed for about 30,000 deaths a year in the UK, 9,000 of those before retirement age.
Ms Boycott said that the changes that had taken place in Britain were being replicated across the world.
“Societies change, women start working, and the fast food and takeways arrive,” she said.
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It has previously been argued that the turning of home cooking into a symbol of drudgery by “second-wave feminists” did help to lead to the spread of fast food chains.
However, it is rare for a self-confessed second-wave feminist, such as Ms Boycott, to admit the connection.
Ms Boycott, a former editor of the Daily Express, was appointed by Boris Johnson to chair the London Food Board and was then asked by his successor, Sadiq Khan, to formulate a new food strategy for London.
Ms Boycott did add at the festival yesterday: “Yes, on the one hand, I say everyone start cooking again. But I don’t want it to be just women. I want it to be men as well.”
Other factors that have been cited for the rise in obesity include society’s increasing reliance on the car, clever marketing from food companies, the advent of computer games and the subsequent reduction in outdoor activities by children, as well as the proliferation of desk-bound jobs.
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Ms Boycott emphasised that there were a number of factors. She highlighted that while hospitals in Scotland were banned from selling junk food, their English equivalents were making money from it. “What they told me in Great Ormond Street is that they get £8,000 every week from Coca-Cola vending machines,” she said. “That’s the cost of keeping a child in hospital for about three days.”
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