My day at You and Yours

The You and Yours day for me starts on the train journey in - I have a whole hour to read the paper - luxury! I buy my own of course - just in case you were wondering and don't choose the same one everyday. I always have a cup of tea too from the station café and take it with me on to the train.

I get in for the meeting at Broadcasting House in London at around eight. The team of six or so people working on the day's programme will have been in for an hour or more and have gone through the office set of newspapers. We look at the papers but we don't rely on them - lots of material comes directly from listeners in emails and calls. When I come in there is full programme already prepared, so it's a question of whether anything in the news should push out something we've already set up. Sometimes we apply the test of whether we all wanted to talk about it in the meeting. So yesterday we put in a piece about the quality of food served to small children in day nurseries. The Local Government Association had studied food served to toddlers in over 10 nurseries in England and Wales over a two year period. You can read their findings here.. They were concerned that children were being given too little food and too much fruit - so the sort of restricted diet that might benefit some adults but is insufficient to meet the needs of growing children.

This was one of those items that I felt could have been given a bit more time. I'lI tell you here about one of the things our guest June O'Sullivan wanted to talk about, but we didn't have time for - which just goes to show no matter how well we think we've planned the timings in our morning meeting... it doesn't always work out - that's live radio for you!

Jane runs a chain of nurseries in London called the London Early Years Foundation. She's developing the first 'National Standards for Early Years Chefs' - a qualification in children's catering. June thinks it's important for staff in nurseries to learn to cook the food they give their charges. She thought that would be more helpful than a set of guidelines or rules and advice imposed from the outside.

One of the great things about researching an item for You and Yours is that you get to watch good programmes you've missed. In preparation for our discussion on palm oil on Wednesday I caught up with Raphael Rowe's Panorama: Dying For a Biscuit.

You can still see it on the BBC iPlayer and I recommend that you do. Even for those of us who don't lose much sleep over the rainforests and the fate of orang-utans, it makes for disturbing viewing. More than half of the world's palm oil comes from the Indonesian island of Borneo. Raphael saw the process of ripping up and burning virgin rainforest there first hand. It's still going on regardless of the world protests and the promises from the Indonesian government.

It only seems to take a reporter to take a trip out of the UK to the developing world to find laws and solemn pledges being broken, whether they're about working conditions in clothes factories or palm oil grown on sites designated as 'protected' by world bodies.

Big companies these days all employ people whose job it is to trace where the materials they use originate- they have titles like 'sustainable agriculture director' - the job of a man called Jan Kees Vis from Unilever who came on to talk about palm oil.

Unilever uses palm oil in Flora margarine but since it's the cheapest vegetable oil in the world, it's an ingredient in an estimated half of all processed food. It's also used in soap, detergent and cosmetics and in biofuels.

To their credit Unilever agreed to put up a spokesman Mark Engel on Panorama and offered Jan Kees Vis to talk about palm oil on You and Yours. They are open about the fact that 85% of what they use is from 'unsustainable' sources. They don't - as Raphael Rowe pointed out - label products as containing 'palm oil' but rather 'vegetable oil'. If you listen again to You and Yours you'll hear why. So as a consumer, you can't really choose to reject it, unless you turn your back on most processed food.

Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

• You & Yours is on BBC Radio 4 at 1200 weekdays. Listen to today's episode on the Radio 4 web site.
• School dinner picture by Ishikawa Ken. Used under licence.

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