Norma, we need to talk

Chef Darina pans Education Department response to cookery campaign

KITCHEN matriarch Darina Allen is on a mission to grill Education Minister Norma Foley over her campaign to get cookery classes on the school curriculum.

The Ballymaloe chef told the Mail Irish Daily she will formally request a meeting after the Department of Education said it had no plans to introduce compulsory cooking lessons.

Ms Allen, 73, launched an online petition last week to get the country’s children dishing up simple but delicious meals at home.

‘No Irish child, boy or girl, should leave school without being able to cook for themselves,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, we are undeniably, failing in our duty of care to our young people. When you teach someone how to cook, you give them a gift that will forever enhance their lives.’

Ms Allen’s call was welcomed by an array of chefs and has since gathered nearly 3,000 signatures on the website MyUplift.

However, the campaign appears to have fallen on deaf ears in some quarters. The Department of Education told the Mail yesterday it had ‘no plans to include further cooking areas in schools’.

A spokesperson for the department said: ‘In order to allow students choice in the subjects studied by them, and to avoid overload, it is not considered desirable to make it a requirement to study specific additional subjects.’ They added that ‘the issue of promoting healthy eating’ was ‘addressed in schools’ through subjects such as home economics, physical education and social, personal and health education.

But the response is not good enough for Ms Allen. ‘OK, they may not have any plans at the moment, but we need to talk. We need to talk about this,’ she said yesterday. ‘We need to discuss a total change of mindset. We know that the food we eat affects our health, energy, vitality, everything – so give me the reason why this should not be a core subject. That’s what I will be asking.

‘How can you argue that something as important as equipping people with the life skills to feed themselves properly cannot be looked on as a fundamental core subject? Indeed, what could be more important?’

Ms Allen will keep going with the campaign and plans to seek a meeting with the Education Minister. ‘I know Ms Foley has been super-busy getting the kids back to school, so I haven’t wanted to bother her – but now is the time,’ she added.

The well-known chef accepts cooking lessons will not be compulsory short term, but wants the Government to commit to the plans by 2023 or 2024.

She added: ‘We need to start a conversation around this and find a solution.’ She said there is a ‘very high consensus that this is the way forward and we need to work together to make it happen’.

The problem with home economics, Ms Allen believes, is the perception the subject is non-academic. She also says it is mostly taught in girls’ schools.

‘There is a stigma, especially for boys, we need Online petition: Darina Allen to change,’ she said. ‘I’m not a cool, chic young person like Jamie Oliver, but I want to do what he did in the UK and make cooking so cool. It needs to be looked on as super-cool.’ Ms Allen is not alone in her determination to make cooking lessons compulsory. Chef JP McMahon said he too will keep campaigning on this matter because ‘food education for children is imperative for their development and their own food sovereignty’. He believes culinary skills should be compulsory and delivered virtual classes to more than 200 children in lockdown. He said: ‘We all need to know how to cook. It’s as important as maths.’

‘I want to do what Jamie Oliver did’