Get the kids into baking these holidays

Letting kids loose in the kitchen requires a flexible attitude and considerable stamina. Chaos, mess, creations that may not even be edible (baking soda used in place of baking powder, salt instead of sugar — you get my drift), these are all outcomes that may well come to play. But if you are prepared not to let anything faze you, and allow children into your sacred domain, then,with a little planning and guidance, they can have a lot of fun and along the way develop confidence and some useful skills.

American food educator Michael Pollan’s famous quote, “Eat all the junk food you want — as long as you cook it yourself. That way, it’ll be less junky, and you won’t eat it every day because it’s a lot of work,” is unlikely to be something most of us can achieve 100 per cent of the time, but it’s certainly worth aspiring to, especially when you start to consider how processed food and fast food have overtaken our diets.

Since the 1960s, rates of home cooking have dropped by half, while obesity soars. Being able to just rip open a packet and consume those delicious chocolate biscuits or dial up a pizza, or reach into the freezer for the icecream container requires a lot less effort than making the biscuit or the pizza or icecream from scratch. If we had to make every single thing we eat — the bread and cereal we have for breakfast, the sushi or pie we eat for lunch, the fries, the burgers, the icecream, the cookies and so on, there’s little doubt that we would be consuming a lot fewer calories every day. We would not have enough time to make all these things.

Not surprisingly, in those cultures where the tradition of home cooking is still strong and children grow up with a toolkit of cooking skills to take into their own lives, there are lower rates of obesity.

The messaging of food marketers would have us believe that cooking is drudgery and a chore best left to the professionals, that we don’t have time to cook, and our time is too important to be spent preparing food. The plethora of cooking shows on our screens showing highly skilled chefs performing amazing culinary feats have actually reduced our confidence, not increased it.

This is why it is so important that kids grow up seeing cooking as something fun and enjoyable. Getting them in the kitchen when they are still young, to mix and stir, roll and bake, is such an easy way to build a sense of success as well as confidence.

I’m a great fan of getting kids started in the kitchen with some home baking. There’s a win-win in cooking something that tastes good, that you can share and bring pleasure to others as well as yourself. You can feel useful and successful at the same time. And yes, part of the work of cooking is cleaning up the mess you’ve made.