Bring back home economics lessons – they are as important as English and Maths, says Gregg Wallace
The Masterchef presenter said the Government needs to impose healthy cooking classes to tackle the current obesity crisis
YOU might have noticed that Mary Berry and I had a very slight disagreement recently – over deep fat fryers.
Now I hear that the Great British Bake Off star has called on the Government to enforce healthy cooking lessons in schools . . . and I couldn’t agree more.
She is absolutely right. Cookery education at school is vital.
I would say it is the most important lesson after English and mathematics.
Of course kids need to learn literacy and numeracy — but if knowing how to feed yourself healthily is not an essential life skill to be taught in class, then what on earth is?
And if you teach the kids to cook healthily, they will pass those skills down to their own children.
It’s a virtuous cycle.
I wasn’t lucky enough to do home economics at school but then I had those sorts of life lessons being handed down by parents.
And that is not always the case with families these days.
Those skills have sadly been in decline since the end of World War Two when we seemed to suffer a complete breakdown in this country.
Instead of concentrating on passing down skills developed over centuries, everything has become about labour-saving devices.
There are gadgets to do our jobs at home for us, and processed food to save us the bother of having to prepare meals ourselves.
We have lost sight of the basics and now we are suffering the consequences of decades of increased reliance on processed foods with the current obesity crisis.
How many people know that a single five-a-day portion of fruit or veg for an adult should be 80g?
If you don’t know how much that is, it’s roughly how much you can fit in the palm of your hand — and that scales down easily for children’s portions.
Mary says kids need to be taught “nutritious, healthy and not expensive” recipes for food “they want to eat”.
Spot on. I’m delighted to agree with Mary on this one.
And if schoolkids are not being taught to cook healthy food they want to eat then somebody needs to take charge. The way any of us eat is vitally important and that starts with what you learn from parents or at school.
Anything we can teach them about health and nutrition when they are young is going to help them growing up and into adulthood, with their physical and mental health.
If you know what are the healthy things to eat — for the good of your body and your mind — and you know how to make a meal with them, you are sorted and you are going to save a lot of money by not buying processed food.
One hour a week, from primary school through secondary school, is enough to instil in kids a lesson they are going to benefit from for the whole of their lives.
I know from doing three series of BBC TV show Eat Well For Less that children are a lot less fussy in what they want to eat than their parents think.
They are incredibly receptive to ideas about what is good for them and — in my experience — they really embrace changes to their diet if you show them that they are not eating the right things.
I hear mums and dads saying they have not got time to cook with their kids, or show them cooking skills. What that really translates to is that they don’t know how, or they are not confident in their own cooking skills. That’s a shame.
Schools can do something about that. And if the kids learn the lessons then they can pass them on to their parents so they all eat more healthily — and save money.
How interesting and exciting the cookery lessons are — and how engaged the kids are by them — is obviously down to the skills of the individual teachers.
But I know what a joy cooking and eating well can be and I also know from programmes like MasterChef how much joy it brings to other people as well.
Knowing how to turn simple, wholesome food, easily and cheaply, into a nutritious meal kids want to eat has got to be one of the best lessons they can learn.
Cooking, to my mind, is a lot more fun than some of the other stuff kids need to learn. It’s creative and fosters a sense of self-achievement.
The alternative is that schools churn out a new generation that can only live off microwaved slop and expensive takeaways.
So, ten out of ten for Mary on this one.