Teach Them About Food, Then Teach Them To Cook
Let Me Ask, What are Cookery Classes in Schools These Days?
Now I can’t speak about every school but I do know that when my children were growing up their experience of cookery class at school was more a mockery than cookery. These lessons were a waste of time and a disrespectful waste of money for us parents who had to purchase the ingredients, only for their child to be making nothing but a fruit salad here, fairy cakes from a cake mix there, and some cornflake cakes in between!
Where to Start?
Where would you start if you were to go into a school and look long term at making a difference? I mean really long term. Let’s look at the obesity that is prevalent right now, the government is trying desperately to prove they can come up with a solution to this problem, and yet again, it’s another case of ‘closing the stable door after the horse has bolted’.
To solve a long term pain, you have to go back to it’s rotten roots - in this case, nip this in the bud early. Jamie Oliver did a sterling job with this when he went into the schools and took to task with the dinner ladies, no mean feat I am sure! The problem with the school dinners, apart from the budget they were working to, is if you offer children an unhealthy option, they will nearly always choose it because they not only prefer that kind of food, but also, when you are hungry, your body craves sugar therefore you will automatically opt for the refined carbohydrates. Having those food groups on the menu meant that they were not only going to present a health problem now but also also later on in life. In addition, children eating these foods in the middle of the day were affecting their sugar levels and making them unnecessarily tired, therefore any afternoon classes were stilted before they started!
But I digress - though the school dinners are important and the government are looking at these now, I believe that the cookery classes in school are just as, if not more important and something that has not been addressed.
Fruit or Fish
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime. - Anne Ritchie
Teaching someone about food, and how to cook means ultimately they will rely less on take-aways, processed foods and oven boxed meals.
How many young adults, or even adults do you meet that don’t know anything about food, and can’t recognise certain fruits, or vegetables these days? Where does this stem from and what’s the answer?
When my daughter was 14 her cookery class equivalent was called ‘Food Tech’. By the name it would lead you to believe that the lesson has evolved and become one which not only teaches them how to cook but also teaches them all about food groups, nutrition, production and processes etc. No. Fruit salad. That was what they had to learn to do on one occasion. Fruit salad! Not a special fruit salad with exotic fruits that might have followed on from some kind of fruit identification class, it was just an ordinary, very simple fruit salad. No skill, no cooking, and in my opinion, nothing a 14 year old needed to learn.
After many more pointless cooking sessions such as that, I refused to allow her to attend the class, on the grounds that not only was she learning absolutely nothing from them, but it was also costing me money buying needless ingredients. I can honestly say that not one class did she ever cook anything that resembled a meal.
What Could we Learn From This?
How about a lesson looking at fish, including descaling, skinning and deboning. Fish is such an important part of our diet and something that is being eaten less and less as more people are becoming unsure of how to treat and eat this wonderful food. Also, Identifying fruits and vegetables, tastIng and discussing their similarities or how they might compliment each other. Looking at meat maps, learning about different cuts, and what this means to the cooking process and taste? Another really important lesson is about store cupboard essentials and why it’s good to have these to hand. All these things are necessary skills to take with you as you get older, but more importantly this knowledge is the basic footing we all need before we start to think about cooking, what to cook and how we want to cook it.
So, What About Obesity?
There are so many confusions around food, diets and nutrition. Too many mixed messages. Without pointing fingers and preaching, without advocating or contradicting, when it all comes down to it, if you ‘know your onions’ you will literally make better food choices in life, which will result in a better you. After all, you really are what you eat, so make sure you know what you’re eating. Cook it yourself and then you know - but without the knowledge it simply is not possible, and this all starts from an early age. Both school and parents have a big part to play, the children who learn from their parents are lucky to have that guidance however not all children have that as we know, so if schools have cooking classes, why not start teaching them to cook.
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