Britain to Mandate Compulsory Cooking Classes in School
Is this a great idea, or what?
Every 11-year-old in England will receive a free cookbook under plans to tackle obesity by teaching children how to prepare healthy meals.
Pupils should learn how to produce healthy versions of such classic dishes as spaghetti Bolognese, risotto, roast chicken or apple crumble, the Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, said yesterday.
…The chef Phil Vickery, who wrote the foreword to the book, said teaching children to cook was the best preparation they could receive for adulthood. “Cooking is a skill and often it is not learned at an early enough age,” he added. “Once you can cook the basics you will have the best survival tool in the box to take you into adult life.”
Confession time: I’m so old, that I had to take cooking classes in junior high school (or middle school, as it’s now called). Girls were required to take cooking and sewing, while the boys took wood and metal shop. Needless to state, neither were permitted to take the classes reserved for the opposite sex.
(Yes – as you might have guessed – I found this incredibly annoying, as I already knew how to cook, and loathed sewing – as well as the sewing teacher, who was an artifact of this era).
But I digress…the point is that cooking was viewed as an essential life skill and was part of the curriculum – just like math, history or science.
Fast forward to the present. I review a lot of diets and am often flabbergasted by what I see. Most people eat plain baked this or boiled that…or else prepared/convenience/fast food, padded by protein supplements and/or meal replacement powders or bars. In other words, it’s either something very basic, or else grab-and-go stuff. Some insist that they don’t have time to cook, but that doesn’t fly. After all, there are plenty of quick-to-prepare, healthy and tasty recipes out there, and tools such as crock pots and microwaves that radically simplify food preparation…if you have some skills to begin with, that is.
IMHO, that’s the real problem: most aren’t, or have rudimentary skills, at best. Thus, it’s no wonder that cooking is viewed as inconvenient and time-consuming.
Between school budget cuts and social justice, something got lost, and we need to reclaim it. Cooking really is an essential life skill – but for EVERYBODY, not just girls. Both my son and daughter know how to cook, and prepare most of their own meals these days (now, if I could only get them to do the dishes voluntarily, I’d be set).
