Food education should be compulsory

THE only conclusion I can draw from recent events is that we have finally and irrevocably lost the plot in this country.

We now have children dictating to us as to what we should and should not be eating, driving, wearing and believing – particularly the first of those.

But listening to the incessant rantings of teens and 20-year-olds about the evils of our diet and the virtues of theirs, the only conclusion I can come to is that they are the products of a failed education system.

One that has failed them in not explaining to them where our food comes from, how it is produced and by whom, how it is processed and the importance of a balanced diet to our physical and mental wellbeing.

Neither has it given them the least instruction as to how to take a basic commodity and turn it into a nourishing and tasty meal.

Food education such as this should have been compulsory. It should – as in my schooldays – have featured on the curriculum in every school (even if at that time domestic science was a girls-only subject). But most school kitchens were ripped out as part of educational ‘reforms’. There was no need, the politicians declared, for anyone to learn how to bake a cake when they were available to buy.

And although I now hear politicians talking up the the idea of apprenticeships as though they had just invented them, it was politicians who, equally, decided years ago that apprenticeships were an outmoded concept and everyone should instead go to university and get degrees in computer gaming or hairdressing. Another link was thus broken.

Young people who would otherwise have gravitated naturally into farming and other rural industries ended up spending two or three years in faraway universities acquiring first-class qualifications which, while they might have looked impressive, were frequently not the magic key that unlocked the chosen career path.

Meanwhile, farmers who traditionally would have offered jobs to newcomers to the industry – not always well-paid at the outset, but jobs with prospects nonetheless – were unable to do so because the ruinously low returns they were getting from supermarkets simply didn’t provide the funds to take on staff.

The outcome of all this has been the arrival of a generation of young people whose knowledge of food – its origins and how to prepare it – is close to zero because that’s how much their parents know.

And this, equally, accounts for the phenomenal explosion of takeaway food outlets in every town and city.

Young people no longer take home-prepared sandwiches to work in a lunchbox; they slip out for a couple of sausage rolls from Greggs. They don’t return at the end of the working day to a home-cooked supper because Domino’s will deliver. And their own children are being brought up in the belief that food is something that somebody else cooks for you and is brought to your front door. A situation where a family regularly spends £25 or more on takeaway food two or three times a week is money just being misspent.

Despite rising prices, £25 still buys a lot of basic ingredients which can be turned into tasty and nourishing meals. All that is lacking is the range of skills to do it. And as things stand, I really don’t see how we are going to encourage people to start acquiring them again.

There was no need, the politicians declared, for anyone to learn how to bake a cake when they were available to buy