After a career training adults (mainly in management skills) it was natural to start teaching my great passion – cooking. This was again mainly to adults, but sometimes to children I knew, especially when I had nephews displaying the issues with food often associated with autism.
As a child, I was a fussy eater myself. Vegetarianism was barely heard of, but had it been an option I would have chosen it as I didn’t like most of the meat I was given. I also hated milk, and the trauma of being made to drink a small bottle of the stuff at school break time makes me gag at the mere memory. After one particularly unpleasant standoff of refusing to eat my school dinner that lasted the entire lunch break, my mother allowed me to switch to packed lunches. So how have I ended up devoting most of my life to food and cooking? The change came almost instantaneously when I left home and cooked for myself and my husband at the age of 18. I had received cookery lessons at school, which I suppose I might credit with giving me at least sufficient knowledge to be confident that I could follow a recipe, but I was almost entirely self-taught, supplemented by short courses in specialist topics.
So, when Colin Tudge, backed up by the great chef Heston Blumenthal, says that cooking should be taught to everyone at school, I experienced some doubt. I asked a friend about her experience of cookery lessons at school and she loved them, and is still making some of the dishes she learnt today. I must keep an open mind, but would like others to do the same. It seems to be a regular knee-jerk response to any aspect of bringing up children that it is the schools job to fill the void. I’m sure that teachers could be found to follow a syllabus teaching the traditional skills of cookery, but equally sure that this would not be the Enlightened Cookery we would want to see. We might instead be reinforcing the negative aspects that we see within our food system. The changes that are being planned for school dinners are an indication of the current mindset that we would be up against.
I want food to be enjoyable and part of a convivial society. Enlightened teachers such as Katharine Burbalsingh aim to achieve this by having an adult eating with each table of children to help ensure that everyone is included in conversation. Children serve one another with food and water and use proper crockery and cutlery. They are gently taught how to eat and how to behave at the table. Katharine Burbalsingh (aka the UK’s strictest teacher) is however one in a million, who recognises that children need the sort of structure and guidance that used to exist in schools.
In contrast what appears to be the norm for school lunches nowadays is children receiving their entire meal on a divided plastic tray. To me these trays look like something you might, just about, be able to understand in a prison where anything can be used as a weapon. Imagine receiving sweet and savoury food on one plate, albeit divided. One of my nephews will not eat anything red in colour (a typically autistic trait, although the colour might be different). In a restaurant, I would need to remove an offending tomato before the rest would be eaten. I have, however, noticed how much they both enjoy being able to take their own portion size from a serving dish and even returning later for second portions should any remain. I don’t think they are unusual in enjoying this level of control.
Teacher feedback records that many children are unable to use cutlery and from my own observation it is clear that many adults struggle too. This is impacting on what food is served in restaurants, with many traditional foods falling by the wayside in favour of foods that can be eaten just with a fork (or spork), held in the right hand and used like a shovel. I have absolutely no objection to left handers using a knife the opposite way round to the “norm”, I’m just not very good at helping someone who is struggling with this. My husband, who is left-handed, has become pretty much ambidextrous, and uses his knife and fork as a right-handed person would. When my left-handed nephew complained that his ham was too tough to cut (it was proper and tender ham), my husband immediately spotted that the issue was that he was trying to cut across the grain rather than with it. He simply advised turning the plate through 90˚ and problem solved. My nephew was delighted with this new-found knowledge and interestingly even his mother said this was new to her. Her solution would have been to either cut the ham for him or let him pick it up with his fingers. Had the nursery he attended helped him at all? Of course not, they have insufficient staff and time. When I picked him up from nursery, I always used to ask how much he had eaten at lunch. All they could tell me was that if there was a tick against his name, he had eaten something.
Schools do, of course, have an important role to play in teaching children about food and cooking. Many children now have much longer days in a school environment, which might begin with breakfast and finish with an after-school club activity. I used to help with a school garden, which took place after normal hours. The children loved to taste what they had grown, in fact I can’t really remember them disliking anything they had grown. The cooking element was minimal, although I did take along a camping gas stove so that we could boil potatoes, which we tasted dressed with butter and mint, and others with a vinaigrette that they had made and shaken. As well as understanding how certain foods are grown (the biggest challenge was finding things that would be ready before the summer holiday started), they also learn about looking after the soil and nature. We had a designated nature area, and also a compost heap. Knowing that you can make soil was an eye-opener and in future I would try to incorporate a wormery.
Harvest Festivals also used to be an important opportunity to learn about food. It was wonderful to harvest a box of fresh produce. That ended when most food banks refused to take fresh food and everyone had to bring tins and packets. I understand the logistical problems for food banks, but I think the fresh produce should have been gifted or auctioned instead. I have recently established a contact with FareShare so that they can pick the excess cooking apples in our community orchard which then get used by other community projects.
There is no denying that the biggest advantage of cooking being taught in schools would be that everyone should be covered. Not just girls as it was when I was at school! Many children do enjoy it; a cookery lesson was often given as a reward for achieving another level in Math’s in my nephew’s special school. However, the biggest question to my mind is how we can engender the desire to learn to cook? If you have that, there are many other ways people can learn.
I had hoped that one of the silver linings to Covid lockdowns would be that people would have to learn to cook. That seemed to backfire dramatically. Whilst there were plenty of examples of new cooking skills acquired during lockdown, making sourdough bread being perhaps the biggest, how many people are still using those skills? Anecdotally, it sounded to me as though women bore the brunt of most of the household and childcare management during lockdown and once it was over they swore never to have to be forced into it again. A similar thing happened when wartime rationing came to an end, not that I am quite old enough to remember, but didn’t end that much before my time. There was an explosion in new convenience foods, the start of ultra-processed foods and almost every household bought at least some of that exciting new food with all its additives.
I sometimes wonder how the staunch supporter of women’s liberation that I was in my teenage years so quickly and happily loved having my own home and cooking. I guess that because I enjoyed it so much, I didn’t feel any resentment at taking on the traditionally female role of cooking, although I definitely made sure I objected whenever I thought this was taken for granted. When my in-laws came to stay and I had just put the joint of meat in the oven for Sunday lunch, the men thought they would slope off to the pub whilst the women cooked the lunch. I insisted we all went and turned the meat down low, saying we could all help with the vegetables when we got back!
In arguing for cooking to be taught as a core subject in all schools, Part 1 of Colin’s Enlightened Cooking noted:
Politically, cooking is of huge significance. Those who are dependent on the good offices of the modern food industry are effectively enslaved, obliged to follow wherever big-time commerce leads. Yet cooking can and should be the great liberator. Cooking, in short, perhaps more than anything, can give people back their autonomy – an essential component of democracy, and indeed a precondition, when democracy is properly construed.
This is the message I believe we need to make clear to get people to want to learn to cook. The world has changed a great deal since I was a young women’s libber, and most men now do some cooking. However, with both partners working full time, it is understandable that shortcuts are taken to get a meal on the table. Cooking is often now looked upon as a hobby rather than an essential life skill. Cooking food from scratch, using raw ingredients does require skills and knowledge but perhaps trickiest of all are the organizational skills to include it in busy everyday lives. I did a quick SWOT analysis to consider the difference in life today and when I learnt to cook 50 years ago:
The loss of traditional cooking skills is actually very well covered online nowadays. I learnt from books, the Time Life Gook Cook series was particularly well illustrated and thorough in every aspect of food preparation and cooking technique, but even that didn’t compare with the YouTube videos you can watch now. Not long ago, I lamented that no-one was interested to learn traditional cooking anymore. Then I heard that Nonna Maxxing was a trend sweeping TikTok and Instagram as an antidote to screen fatigue. Forget the irony of this usually involving yet more screen time, but the point was that people wanted more tactile hobbies such as cooking and were then posting their results under the hashtag Nonna Maxxing. The longer the cooking process took the better it seems – rolling fresh pasta by hand, making long-simmering sauces and family dining were the things being posted. There was also a lot of respect for tradition, recipes passed down through the generations became especially valued. The Maxxing suffix has since been adopted for other hobbies that fulfil a similar purpose, e.g. being more involved in traditional crafts and taking time away from the screen to do them even if you can’t resist posting something about it!
Learning isn’t always from online sources, young people seem to find money to attend courses judging by the number offered, which all look rather over-priced to me, although I would never say that of a course at Ireland’s Ballymaloe, of which I have never heard anything other than the highest praise. Take a look at all the traditional subjects they now teach even if you don’t intend to go there.
https://www.ballymaloecookeryschool.ie
A big opportunity to reset routine has been presented by working from home. There is much that can and has been said both for and against this, but it has opened up new opportunities for sharing household management. Many couples work from home just one or two days a week but if you can, arrange it so that between a couple this covers the entire week everyone get involved in the school run and the cooking.
I did manage to cook from scratch everyday even when I was working full time (unless I had to work away). This usually involved careful advance planning so dishes could be put in the oven in the morning with a timer set to turn the oven on. When I later started to work from home it widened to scope of meals that were possible. The saving in travel time was invaluable too.
I have written previously about the importance of https://www.colintudge.com/finding-your-rhythm and will undoubtedly write more on the subject in the future too, but for now, let’s just keep all the possibilities on the table.
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