Cooking healthy food with the kids and creating a backyard fitness circuit are among the homework assignments for fathers taking part in a research program called Healthy Dads, Healthy Kids designed to help 54 men shrink their waistlines - and teach them to be healthier role models for their primary school-aged children.

We might think mothers are the main influence on children's diet and health, but the reality may be different, says Associate Professor Philip Morgan from the University of Newcastle - he's the one setting the homework, and teaching the fathers the basics of weight loss and healthy eating. "The roles of fathers are changing. More families have two parents working and more fathers are involved with food preparation and food shopping than in the past. It's also much easier to get children to eat healthy food if both parents are on the same page - you can target mothers as much as you you like, but if the father isn't giving the same messages about eating and being active, or is eating junk food in front of the TV, it's much harder to create healthy environments for their children," he says.

The issue of live animal exports is about to hit a raw nerve. In early December, many Australian sheep exported live to the Middle East will be sold for use in private sacrifice to people celebrating the annual festival of Eid-al-Adha. In one corner is Animals Australia, the animal protection organisation whose website carries now familiar images from previous festivals of trussed sheep on roof racks and in car boots being driven away for slaughter. In the other, are organisations like Meat and Livestock Australia and the Australian Livestock Export Animal Welfare Group whose website has pictures of contented animals, along with a statement from Peter Dundon, the Livestock Services Manager for the Middle East for the MLA and LiveCorp, insisting that the Animals Australia images aren't typical of how Australian animals are handled during the rest of the year.

As the festival nears, both sides of the debate are mounting awareness campaigns. Animals Australia has a National Day of Action against live export on November 14, while in Bahrain, one of many Middle Eastern countries to which Australia exports live animals, the MLA will run an awareness campaign for local people buying animals for sacrifice. The campaign, consisting of newspaper ads and brochures, recommends buyers have suitable vehicles for transporting the sheep - meaning vehicles with ramps allowing them to be walked on to a vehicle, rather than trussed and lifted. "I'm not saying we're going to get 100 per cent compliance, but that's our objectve," said Dundon when I spoke to him last week. What about handling practices when the animals are taken home? "I suppose it's like dog owners. My wife breeds dogs and when you sell a dog you can't be sure how that animal will be looked after," he said."It amazes me that people have the expectation that you can guarantee the welfare of every sheep that's sold."

It might be raining cookbooks and celebrity chefs, but since we've become so dependent on processed food and takeaways, many of us have lost confidence in the kitchen - or never had it to start with. You can point the finger at a range of reasons - too much to do in too little time, the loss of cooking classes in school, and marketing campaigns that have convinced us we're too busy to cook and need manufacturers to do it for us.

We are busy. But what's often missing isn't only time. It's also basic cooking skills - and, just as importantly, the persistence to practice them until you can make simple meals fast. Knowing how to steam rice or make pesto without having to hunt down a recipe and follow it is what gets fresh, healthy food on the table quickly. Dependence on too many packets and jars, on the other hand, not only adds too much sodium and other questionable ingredients to your food, but it can stunt your growth in the kitchen too. So what does give you confidence in the kitchen?

I love cabbage, but my heart sinks whenever I see a bowl (or supermarket pack) of coleslaw where the ratio of mayo to vegetable looks like two to one. Commercial mayonnaise is one of those condiments that seems to obliterate the real flavour of food - no bad thing, of course, if the food is really grim but if you're masking, rather than complementing good flavours, what's the point?

Besides, if you're going to the trouble of chopping and grating vegetables for a salad, why not make it as healthy as possible rather than adding a whole lot of additives and the unnamed vegetable oils that make up some commercial dressings? That's why coleslaw from my kitchen is more likely to be a lighter Asian version, held together with a mix of olive oil (ok, so not exactly Asian), rice vinegar, fish sauce and lime. It's also an excuse to be heavy handed with the fresh mint - a good source of iron and folate that's also been found (at least in animals) to have anti-cancer effects.

The small vine ripened tomatoes in the supermarket were so ripe and tempting and so reasonably priced that I picked them up, intending to buy them. But somewhere in mid air, halfway between shelf and trolley I put them back - they were packaged in plastic. There's a lot of boxes to tick when we food shop - like is the product fresh, is it free of trans fats, low in sodium and was it produced outside a cage? I think I'm on top of most of this, but now I'm trying to get better at avoiding excess packaging. It's a move prompted by the Watch Your Waste campaign running in North London where I was earlier this month, which challenged residents to see how close they could get to a waste-free week.

Because I cook mostly from scratch, most of the waste generated in my kitchen is compostable. I use water from taps, not bottles and when I shop I toss most fruit and vegetables in the trolley without putting them in plastic bags first. But often I'll get home and curse myself for not thinking twice about packaging. Most of the time it's because I've seized on food that's being sold off cheaper - think ripe bananas for baking or wrinkly old parsnips for roasting - and grabbed it. It's as if my mind registers the low price and, but not the styrofoam tray and cling wrap it comes with. It's all very well to remember to take reusable bags along when you shop - but it's also important not to bring a lot of excess plastic back home too, so here's what I'm trying to do.