Too many cooks?

The government has announced plans that teenagers are to be given compulsory cooking lessons (one hour per week for one term for children ages 11-14), and, surprise surprise, the mothers and commenters at Alpha Mummy are up in arms again. Not content with bickering over the virtues of stay-at-home mother vs working-mother and all other aspects of parenting, they have to give their 'considered' opinions here too.

I thought that so-called 'Alpha-Mummies' would be the first to think that learning to cook was a positive thing. That proper mothers cooked proper meals and would involve their children from the start, encouraging them to make up their own minds relating to the ethics of vegetarianism and so-on. But no, all the 'usual suspects' have their own views. There is Theta Sigma Mummy who is abhorred by the idea of someone involving meat in the lives of her off-spring. There are various mothers arguing about how many A-levels they got, Oxbridge entrance and music lessons being more important than cookery. There is 'BaggofBones' who says and I quote "Whatever you can't work out for yourself from reading a recipe, M&S can provide in ready-made form".Then there is Supermother, someone who thinks she is the last word in the opinions of working mothers (and she may well be for all I know, but she and the other commenters have pigeon-holed her to the extent that she now seems to believe her hype as well). I could go on but I can't bear to as it is rather off my original topic.

It rather seems that none of these mothers think before they start arguing the same old points over and over again. Ideally we want our children to be well rounded creatures who are capable of looking after themselves emotionally, financially, nutritionally and also career-wise with a job which suits them and allows security in the first three areas. I agree that there are some aspects of these areas which are more ideally suited to home or school learning. There are some lucky children who will learn all of these things at home and the school education will merely reinforce and further their education. Sadly, there are many more children whose home lives are lacking in some fashion and will never learn anything academic let alone anything which might actually be useful.

Cooking, I think, is a great place to start with education. I am not necessarily saying that I agree with the current proposals for secondary school but I think that properly worked through and perhaps starting when they are tiny that there is mileage in this idea. After all, food is essential to us, second only to water (and some might argue, sleep). If someone can feed themselves, nutritionally, on basic rations, that seems like a good starting point for dealing with life in general, let alone obesity. Cooking can be used as a medium which is interactive and practical and a light relief but which teaches reading, mathematics (weights, conversions, percentages and so on) budgeting, science ( e.g. chemistry: ice - water -steam; biology: parts of the body and so on). Taken to it's logical conclusion with older children it can involve business models, customer care, financial advice, literary criticism and writing skills. The list must be endless.

I am not suggesting that cooking should take the place of academic subjects. However, I think that a course or curriculum could be devised which would take place instead of say, one general studies lesson every two weeks and which could use cooking as the medium for more serious learning, thereby enforcing within children's minds that cooking is easy and cheaper than its ready-made cousin, that diet, nutrition and being able to look after oneself is an important aspect of life and that cooking is not something merely for women or 'the thick ones' (as one Alpha Mummy commenter suggested). It would also reinforce the idea for children that they can be their own person. Just because Mummy or Daddy is vegetarian (or not) doesn't mean that the child should be subjected to this too. S/he should be able to make their own decisions, but informed decisions. This should extend to ethical decisions regarding price versus animal welfare and other age appropriate issues on which people should be able to debate rationally.

Bank Holiday Weekends: Home Cooked Meals & Dog Walking

What a pleasure it is on those few Sunday evenings every year when you can actually do something safe in the knowledge that there is no work to be done on the following morning. I sit here at the computer in solitude, a few brief moments in a busy weekend. Music plays in another room and I can hear M and his brother pottering in the kitchen, snatches of conversation drifting along the corridor carried along as a spoken accent on top of Nick Cave's vocals.

I have spent the afternoon cooking, three 'generations' of women in the kitchen. Me, M's mother and M's grandmother. I helped to ice a cake, to make fresh pasta, long elegant strips of tagliatelle which were laid to dry on a teatowel in the afternoon sunshine and then helped bake a tower of profiteroles, from cooking the choux pastry to drizzling the chocolate over the creamed filled buns. I also chopped up a mountain of vegetables, peppers, corguettes, shallots, tomatoes and potatoes, to be roasted to eat alongside a fillet of beef.

This morning we went for a walk. The dog was initially a little bemused; six people do not usually accompany her for her morning walk up a large hillside and back. It was hard work, climbing up through the forest in my borrowed trainers (sandals and ugg boots were not deemed ideal footwear) and skinny jeans more at home in London than the countryside. But what a view. The forest soon gave way to hillside of grass ferns and heather and then opened out by the trig point where we stood and looked out over the Shropshire countryside towards the Welsh hills, momentarily distracted by the hang gliders floating on the thermals. It was busy at the summit though so we didn't pause for long, starting to wind our way down the path which, unsually, seemed rather more steep on the way down. We dropped back down into the forest through a path of waist height ferns and picked our way along a path littered with dry pine needles and small twigs, holding onto the trees for support as we passed, emerging finally at the bottom at the car park where we had left the car two hours previously.