If Helen Burgess had been running the country 10 years ago, she would have mandated lessons for every child in how to identify and cook healthy food. As it was, this advocate for good nutrition had to keep her “very strong views” to herself during a high-flying civil service career.
“I had privileged access to all these issues lumbering through – the sugar tax, obesity, hospital food – but I had to stay strictly impartial,” explains the former private secretary to Sir Jeremy Heywood in the Cabinet Office.
Before becoming pregnant with her son Artie in 2013, she had risen to a departmental head of strategy – but the 40-year-old admits that her high-pressure work trajectory was hastening towards implosion.
“I loved my job, but it was pretty brutal with the hours and the stress in Cabinet and Number 10, and having Artie gave me the chance to pursue my passion.” Her maternity leave kick-started a career change, reinventing herself as an evangelist for inculcating the importance of good nutrition in the young.
That passion was kindled 20 years earlier with what Burgess calls “the weirdest Christmas present ever” – a book by a doctor who claimed to have overcome cancer thanks to her healthy diet.
“The book had a lasting effect. I became known as Superfood Helen at university, urging friends to eat more kiwis because the Vitamin C in them was a great hangover cure!”
After completing a three-year diploma course in nutrition, Burgess launched Little Cooks Co, a subscription service designed to engage children in healthy eating with recipes and meal kits. The business started in her front room and this year it achieved a £1m turnover, reaching around 10,000 subscribers.
Now Burgess has followed it up with You Can Cook Tasty Food, a bright, smart recipe book aimed at junior foodies with a grown-up willing to supervise them.
“Artie can make himself breakfast pancakes and could probably rustle up an omelette, but I’m always watching him at the stove,” she says of her seven-year-old, who gets sole rights in their household to chop the mushrooms for spag bol. “He’s so proud of that this job which is only his. We started when he was two, mixing cake batter and pouring it into pans together, and I bought him a child-safe knife when he was three.”
Artie clearly has an advanced palate. “He does the recipe-testing, and when he lets me know a dish has too much cinnamon he’s usually right.” This has been driven by Burgess’s belief that tastebuds should be tickled early. “The more flavours a child is exposed to young the better.”
Her recipes are anything but bland. Children are instructed to chop garlic into tomatoes on toast and lace them with balsamic vinegar, add fresh mint to their meatballs, and make ketchup and tortilla wraps from scratch.
She hopes that more parents will use half-term to cook with their children, and suggests a supermarket trip to pick out a new, intriguing ingredient as a starting point. As well as Romanesco broccoli, which is “positively psychedelic”, she suggests buying “anything else a child fancies the look of and has never tried before.
“The key is to get them to choose, and to commit to cooking the ingredient with them.”
The slower pace of school holidays is an ideal time to get into the kitchen en famille, she says. “You can afford to make a mess when you don’t have to be somewhere immediately afterwards. And I recommend the biggest mixing bowl you can find to minimise spillage!”
Burgess’s book maximises on the fun aspects of healthier foods, explaining how the brightest-coloured fruits and vegetables often contain the most nutrients, for example.
She exhorts the advantages of cooking from scratch, being “horrified” learn recently that 64 per cent of what British children consume is classed as ultra-processed. “It makes me very angry – like the fact our restaurants seem to offer the worst, most unhealthy food choices for children’s menus, whereas in tribal societies they are reserved the best, because it’s known the young need nutritious food to help them grow.”
Now out of politics, she can be frank about how she feels about government initiatives to improve nutrition: basically, that they don’t go far enough.
“It’s definitely a good thing to crack down on advertising unhealthy food to children, but the sugar tax has just resulted in the sugar being replaced with artificial sweeteners which bring their own problems – they can affect the gut’s microbiome and hormone production. It’s an unintended consequence, but I don’t agree with it at all.”
Two of Helen’s recipes
Lollipop sticks, a tray that will fit in the freezer, parchment paper
Toppings and sprinkles, such as freeze-dried strawberries or pomegranate seeds
Peel the bananas and cut them in half.
Carefully push a lollipop stick into the cut end – make sure the lollipop stick is in the middle of the banana so it doesn’t go through the sides.
Dip the bananas into your tub of yoghurt so they are totally covered.
Add your sprinkles now if you are using any.
Carefully lay them on a tray covered with parchment paper and pop them in the freezer for at least one hour. When they are ready, gently peel from the parchment paper.
Beef burgers packed with veg
Chopping board and knife, measuring cups/scales, mixing bowl and spoon, tea towel, frying pan, grater, kitchen roll
500g minced beef
50g tomato passata
1 small onion
1 medium courgette
1 small carrot
1 small apple
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp smoked paprika
Salt and pepper
Olive oil for frying
Finely chop the onion.
Grate the courgette, carrot and apple over a clean tea towel and then squeeze the juice out over the sink.
Place all of the ingredients in a mixing bowl and mix thoroughly.
Shape into burger patties and pop in the fridge for 5 minutes.
Heat a glug of olive oil in a frying pan ready for cooking.
Fry the burgers for about 5−7 minutes on each side (until browned and not pink in the middle) then place on a piece of kitchen roll to soak up any excess oil/liquid before transferring to a plate to cool a little.
They can be eaten as they are, or serve in burger buns or pitta bread with your favourite toppings. What about trying lettuce, sliced tomato and avocado?