"AND you can't even tell people they're fat anymore," said the TV pundit, raging.

Was there ever a time you could tell people they were fat and it not be considered impolite? I wonder if she was concerned about medical professionals, nimbly nipping around their patient's BMI with some gentle euphemisms.

The discussion had been about the decision to ban junk food advertising pre-watershed. Good idea or nanny state, the all too predictable question.

It's always interesting to see how these issues are discussed, as though one measure in isolation should be the silver bullet to resolve obesity and poor diet and, should that one step be found wanting, then it should be binned.

You don't resolve decades of health inequality, driven by a complex web of causes, not least poverty and lack of access to nutritious food, with one advertising ban. But that doesn't make the advertising ban a bad idea, it makes it one idea in a stacked deck of ideas.

It's become fashionable to refer to "holistic approaches", which really just means a multi-faceted approach with wellbeing and welfare at its heart.

Which is why the new Glasgow City Food Plan is such an impressive document, launched earlier this month to surprisingly little fanfare.

It has been two years in the making with input from more than 600 individuals and organisations before a public consultation on the finished document.

In Glasgow more than 60 per cent of adults are overweight or obese, which is about the same as the UK average.

The figure for P1 children, aged four and five, is 20 per cent - that's just more than double the UK average.

Decades of inequality and decades of low life expectancy partly caused by unhealthy diet can't be solved with one approach, and the City Food Plan takes a wide ranging view of how to tackle Glasgow's issues.

It is not, it must be emphasised, all about weight loss but also about food poverty, the environment and ensuring everyone has access to locally sourced, good quality, healthy food.

A great deal of the current work being done relies on the third sector filling gaps in provision so it is heartening to see the plan emphasise that public sector catering should support this work by increasing the amount of locally sourced food it uses.

One of the most important initiatives is a stated desire to push for more growing space in Glasgow and encourage allotment space and urban farms.

House builders will be encouraged to have growing spaces in new developments, which should surely be legislated as compulsory.

There is nothing more satisfying and nothing better to reconnect a person to food than growing it yourself, than being involved in the creation of it from seed to tongue.

I say this with some bitterness as my carefully tended garlic on our allotment didn't split so I now, after many months of nurturing, have 25 golf ball cloves of garlic. But as a rule of thumb, you can't beat it.

It's a source of endless frustration that, on any social issue, someone will bleat "They should teach it in schools." Teachers have enough teaching to do in schools without tackling every social ill on top but... let me join the bleating on this one issue. No suggestion at all of compulsory playground allotments - but getting more young people involved in growing their own food could only be beneficial to health.

Dumfries House, owned by Prince Charles, uses its kitchen garden as an educational resource for school pupils. They plant their own vegetables, are taught to tend to them, and then are taught to cook them. A teacher there I spoke to said it was incredible how many pupils still, now, don't realise carrots come from the ground or that peas put out beautiful blooms with their fruit.

There's an orchard in the middle of Queen's Park, on Glasgow's south side, where raspberry bushes growing alongside apple trees. It is always delightful to watch children stumble across it and realise they can pick and eat the fruit.

Only one in 10 people in Glasgow say they have five or more portions of fruit and vegetables a day. The five-a-day target is fairly arbitrary - in Australia, say, it's two of fruit and five of veg. In Japan there was a recommendation for 13 portions of vegetables plus four of fruit daily. That's a lot of fibre.

Arbitrary or not, it's a decent target to aim for in correcting the city's collective shameful record. Waiting lists for allotments are years-long yet there are vacant pockets of land all across the city and clearly an, pardon the pun, appetite for it. The city plan states an aim to increase land for growing by 50 per cent by 2023. About time.

Correcting the multiple issues that force people to poor food options is extremely complex but this gives hope we can really do something about it. From tiny acorns after all.