THE CHILDREN WHO THINK COWS LAY EGGS
Scottish children are woefully ignorant about where food comes from and how to cook healthily, leading to an obesity epidemic. The answer, says Rosie Morton, is a return to compulsory home economics
With child obesity on the rise, is it time to make home economics compulsory?
Home economics is frequently criticised as an old-fashioned, outdated, irrelevant anachronism which has outstayed its welcome on 21st-century school curriculums. But with three in ten children unaware that tuna comes from fish, a third oblivious to the fact that pork comes from a pig, and a shocking tenth of our six to eleven-yearolds believing that eggs are laid by cows, we need to think again.
These are just the latest appalling statistics in a trend that is now well entrenched. Just ten years ago 60% of Scottish youngsters admitted they didn’t know how to boil an egg, and today almost a quarter of our children are either overweight or obese on the day they start school, contributing significantly to the annual bill of £600 million – and climbing – faced by NHS Scotland for weight-related conditions.
What’s more, 10% of Scottish children aged 2-15 consume no fruit or vegetables on a typical day, a figure that has remained unchanged since 2008. If alarm bells aren’t ringing in every educational institution in the country, signalling a need for change, how horrifying do the statistics need to become before they act? It is time to introduce compulsory home economics classes.
‘In the world we live in, parents appear to have less time to engage in some aspects of family life because of long working hours,’ says Bill Ramsay, president of the Educational Institution of Scotland (EIS), who advocates practical food classes in schools. ‘Convenience food fills that gap – it has become normalised. We need to be able to teach our children to cook and appreciate cooking, but we have issues over shortages of home economics teachers.’
As part of its efforts to entice more people into the profession, the Scottish Government has launched a £20,000 bursary scheme for career changers looking to become home economics teachers. Which sounds wonderful until you realise that staff shortages are only a small part of a much wider issue: in a postcode lottery situation, some schools offer free home economics classes, while others charge families significant sums to cover the cost of resources.
Crieff High School is a prime example, charging National 5 students £125 for hospitality lessons and £75 for cake decorating each year, while Kinross High School – a 40-minute drive away – charges nothing. All this in an area where 1,358 School Clothing Grants were issued by Perth and Kinross Council in 2018 for families struggling to clothe their children. For many, the additional expense of home economics simply isn’t an option.
So what can be done? If there are insufficient provisions to cover practical cooking classes in all schools across Scotland, greater emphasis could be placed on academic, nutritional tutorials
in Social Education and Guidance classes. At the very least this would minimise the ‘what came first, the cow or the egg’ questions. Alternatively, if hands-on lessons can’t be free to all students, discrete waivers could aid those unable to cover the costs themselves.
Prue Leith, Great British Bake Off judge and chancellor of Queen Margaret University – an institution that prides itself on its postgraduate diploma in home economics – has several times championed the importance of foodrelated education, and while she understands that food poverty is a serious, ‘complex and multidimensional’ issue, she says there is no doubt that a contributing factor to the nation’s health issues and poor nutritional knowledge is ‘a lack of cooking skills’.
Even if practical cooking classes or academic tutorials went a small way to bettering youngsters’ understanding of food, they’d be worthwhile; never mind their potential to alleviate some of the colossal strain on our national health services. (Scotland is one of the fattest countries in the developed world, with obesity linked to around 2,200 cases of cancer a year in Scotland and rapidly escalating numbers of people suffering from Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and hypertension).
‘It can’t just come from schooling,’ says Ramsay. ‘But people need to be educated as to the options and availabilities. If people view the food chain solely through the marketing of supermarkets, clearly we’re going to have challenges.’
While parents must shoulder much of the responsibility, some lack the necessary culinary knowledge to impart to their children. With the demise of traditional school dinners coinciding with the rise of time-poor households where both parents work, children have become increasingly used to junk food and microwaved meals. Shockingly, almost a third of parents admitted in a 2017 YouGov survey that they have ‘given up’ trying to feed vegetables to their children.
It is time for parents to reassert so-called ‘old-fashioned’ values – whether that means enforcing cut-off times for screens, eating around the dinner table, or making children eat their greens. But schools also have a key role to play if the nation’s children are to avoid becoming victims of an obesity epidemic that is costing thousands of Scottish lives each year.
If the only way to encourage healthy eating and an appreciation for nutrition is for schools to teach children to boil an egg because their parents are unable or unwilling to do so, then bring it on.
“It can’t just come from schooling, but people need to be educated