AH, September. I love this last golden gasp of summer as it slides into autumn. No other month can evoke childhood like new school shoes and shiny conkers, but most evocative of all is seasonal produce.

Keats was spot-on about mellow fruitfulness: I only have to see punnets of blackberries and suddenly I'm wandering down memory lane plundering dusty hedgerows.

Victoria plums make me recall my first chin-dripping discovery of them in my grandparents' garden, while English apples never fail to remind me of the tooth-edge sharpness of a windfall Russet eaten straight from the grass.

That direct contact with food is something few children have these days, my own daughter included (and that's despite my right-on organic-mum predilection for stuffing her pack-up with fruit she never eats). I took her to a farm shop recently so that she could see food in the raw and she was amazed that sweetcorn grew in fields. Redcurrants, glistening like bunches of gorgeous jewels, were a revelation, but she was horrified to see me eating raspberries straight from the canes.

"You can't do that," she said, when I told her how we used to suck clover flowers for their nectar when we were kids.

We used to eat freshwater mussels from the river and cook the horse mushrooms that sprang up overnight in the fields, too, but she's right, I wouldn't do that now. I get them shrink-wrapped from Sainsbury's like everything else.

This came back to me when I visited the York Festival of Food and Drink, which has been running for the past ten days and finishes on Sunday. There's a wealth of fresh regional produce on offer in the covered market in St Sampson's Square and at the various tasting sessions - if you missed it last week, Slow Food North Yorkshire is having another taste workshop this afternoon at the Mansion House - which made me vow to shop at farmers' markets in future.

This year the Food Festival has also put a commendable emphasis on food education, particularly for children. Last Sunday saw a busy hands-on workshop for kids, in which they got to make butternut squash ravioli, Indian breads, raspberry crunch, coronation chicken and 'real' fish fingers. This week there were sessions on healthy eating aimed at primary schools and food science demonstrations for older children, as well as a lively inter-school cookery challenge and classes in a mobile 'cooking bus' parked in Parliament Street.

When I dropped into the Guildhall, teenagers were learning about bread-making, being instructed on how to read nutritional information panels on food labels and whisking up proper mayonnaise from eggs and oil.

Many young people can't even cook simple meals by the time they get to college, which means this lot already have an advantage; at the very least they'll be able to decipher the junk that goes into a Pot Noodle as well as whip up a decent sandwich.

Apparently, few of the younger children that had come the previous day knew what a pineapple was and a fair number couldn't identify a kiwi fruit, which goes to show that the trickle-down of the Jamie Oliver effect is going to take some time. But I'm encouraged: school meals are improving, cookery is making a return to the curriculum, there's free fruit at break time and some schools are even growing their own produce.

The Allotment Club at my daughter's school appears to be the most popular after-school club of all, although this may be due in part to the allure of calling themselves the Mud Pies.

So, can we wean kids off chips and ketchup and on to brown rice and broccoli instead?

We face an uphill struggle against advertisers - Sunny D's manufacturers would have it that "No child's like Max Wilde", their brussel sprouts-loving nerd, while Warburton's All in One bread is white pap designed to satisfy woolly-jumper-wearing mums that the kids are getting their fibre.

Does this matter? Yes it does.

A new series that began on BBC3 last Thursday called Honey, We're Killing The Kids featured some scary projections of the long-term consequences of our children continuing to live and eat as they do.

And it's not just their health: as long as there are gimmicky foods such as Fruit Winders and Frosties packets telling you they're OK to eat if you run around a bit, our children won't want to eat anything without a cartoon character's endorsement or be any more enlightened about what real food is.

Harvest festival is coming up soon, a celebration of all this late-summer plenty. When I hear the children singing the chorus of their favourite harvest festival song - "The apples are ripe, the plums are red, broad beans are sleeping in a blankety bed" - I wonder how many of them have slit open a fat bean pod and seen the silky lining for themselves.

They may have eaten a Victoria plum, though I doubt they'll have gnawed on a Russet. They don't have the Mr Men on them.

Updated: 09:24 Saturday, September 24, 2005