Obesity

[Blue Hills]

When I first started to fend for myself I taught myself two cooking skills: 1) Mince thing (fried onions, peppers, seasoning. Bung in mince. Add tin of tomatoes).

I'm not far past that now - am lucky in that I can quite happily eat similar stuff for days on end - I usually add chopped small tomatoes to the tinned ones - usually from a couple of markets not far from you. Sometimes buy 2 or 3 bags.
Top tip - tomatoes can be frozen for such things - fact they are frozen makes them easier to slice/chop for the sauce without them squirting all over - they soon thaw when thrown in the mix.
You can't freeze tomatoes for other uses - they lose all their substance on thawing.

You end up with something way better than the overpriced additive added tomato slop sold as ready sauce in many supermarkets.

 

[Blue Hills]

The great thing about Mince Thing is that depending on what you bung in with the onions, and what you do afterwards is it could end up as a curry, a spaghetti sauce, a shepherds pie or many other gourmet dishes. In my student days you'd add a pan full boiled lentils to make a vast quantity of of Bland Mince Slop (mmmm) for feeding lots of people.

The mince thing in my student days turned into the infamous "spaghetti meal" - the recipe and quantities just got bigger and bigger - in the end we were struggling to eat it all.
If you are doing the sauce without mince you don't need to use any oil - the onions/peppers and whatever can just saute/soften in the tomato juice. Don't need to be fried.

 

[Blue Hills]

Are you Heston Bumenthal?

Hardly.
I may one day OD on tomatoes though.

 

[battered]

Mince Thing without Mince? That would just be Thing.

Mince Thing without mince is just deviancy. Weirdoes. Mince Thing is perfect student food. Lob in red kidney beans for chilli, if you are being posh and trying to impress someone cute, add salad and tortillas and a bottle of red, nothing not to like.

 

[battered]

I do think we definitely need to see more on the education front - teach the kiddies from primary level upwards, take advantage of that curiosity to get a good grounding in the basics.

Cooking, gardening and healthy eating should be on the school curriculum - not "Food Technology" in its current format*. Cooking is a life skill anyways, and all three are sides of the same coin as it were anyway.

Certainly. Children are in school for 6 hours a day, 5 days. What are you taking out of their day to put this in?

i'd be pretty surprised/amazed if that wasn't the case - i reckon the higher ups know what they are after and those below fall into line.

Give over with the conspiracy theory. I've been in the food industry for over 30 years, working at all levels, and trust me, no bugger in it is that bloody clever.

I was reminded of a similar sort of thing a friend with a teenage daughter told me about a few years ago. The teenage daughter was - quite rightly - disgusted beyond measure, being a keen cook herself and her mother at the time a professional chef at an upmarket golf club. And both of them bloody good all-round cooks.
Young Alice apparently told the teacher in no uncertain terms what she thought - and had support from a couple of her classmates in flatly refusing to bring in the weird assortment of tinned and packet ingredients demanded of them, instead saying they would make the item - whatever it was - out of 'proper' ingredients. And they did.

Good for her. What did she do to help the children from the local estate who didn't bring any ingredients in at all because they didn't have it at home and their parents didn't give them to money to go and buy them?

There could be a practical/ policy reason for that. All of the listed items are sealed. Would you want to eat cottage pie made with mince that has been knocking around at the bottom of a schoolchild's satchel all day?

Absolutely right. Add in the time available. What's a lesson, an hour? I'm not convinced that I could do cottage pie from scratch to plate in an hour, and I know what I'm doing. In fact I couldn't, unless I cheated.

I get what you are saying - up to a point. When I did Home Economics at school, most of the ingredients were provided.

But teach you the skills? No, I'm not so sure about that. Going back to the cottage pie made from packaged ingredients. I mean you don't learn how to wash, peel, cut up, boil and mash potatoes. You don't learn when they are underdone or just right. You don't learn about how not to put too much meat in your pan else it will steam and not brown, you don't learn how to deglaze your frying pan and add flour to make the gravy. You don't learn about seasoning or what consistency things should be.

The target here is a child aged under 16. You're going to teach this to 30 of them, in an hour, when half of them haven't brought in the materials because "we 'ent got no tates at 'ome, or carrots, or mince, or owt."? That's ambitious.

Yeah, I was just suggesting an underlying reason for wanting sealed ingredients to be brought in

Well it's true that some kids will have been exposed to cooking skills, many won't. I know I was not. So I think a gentle introduction to the concept of bunging things together and transforming them from "ingredients" to "meal" may be needed for these kids.

But I'm not much of a cook, and know nothing at all about teaching so the above may be rubbish.

No, you are quite right.

 

[winjim]

Tin of mince £1.50. Instant mash 28p. Chopped onion £1.00. Tinned peas 40p. Total £3.18, but the mince already has onion in it so omit that and you can do it for £2.18. Shelf life a couple of years.

Fresh mince £1.49. Single onion 10p. Pack of potatoes 89p. Frozen peas 59p. Total £3.07. Shelf life a couple of days.

In a world of food banks, cooking from tins is a skill in and of itself.

 

[Fab Foodie]

In a world of food banks, cooking from tins is a skill in and of itself.

An area where Jack Monroe has done brilliant work to reduce the cost of eating and making tasty and nutritious food and slayed a few food critics en-route. When Delia tried it she got hammered :-( It must be tough for the middle classes....

 

[Kingfisher101]

I was never taught to cook, I taught myself as I went along. At 6 I could use the cooker by myself and prepare a simple meal like an omelette with chips or salad. I could now cook any family meal within reason without having to look up what to do etc. All we did at school was learn how to make a vegetable soup, that's it.
I think now though something does need to be done about childhood obesity, I know 2 children who were over 20 stones each in their teens etc. Once someone gets used to high sugar, high fat food its very difficult to wean them off and go for something like a chicken salad or salmon with veg etc which is more like what people should be eating. Not pizza, fried chips and loads of coke with a donut etc.

 

[winjim]

An area where Jack Monroe has done brilliant work to reduce the cost of eating and making tasty and nutritious food and slayed a few food critics en-route. When Delia tried it she got hammered :-( It must be tough for the middle classes....

I kind of think that if you're the kind of family that has the wherewithal, in terms of time, money and skills, to cook from fresh the majority of the time, then you're probably going to pass that down to your kids anyway. So they aren't the ones we need to target. We need to teach kids basic skills, not fancy chef stuff. You've got an hour a week to teach thirty kids how to cook? Good luck with that.

 

[KnittyNorah]

"How to use a can opener" is not to be sniffed at. As noted above there are plenty of decent healthy foodstuffs available in tins. And it's a big step up from takeaways. So learning how to make, say, beans on toast or sardines on toast could be quite a breakthrough in cheap healthy eating. Again it's something that, going back to my student days, I got a deal of satisfaction from.

If the teacher had wanted to start on the basics of healthy eating combined with speed, cheapness, ease and convenience, then I agree 100% that beans and/or sardines on wholemeal toast - maybe with a couple of grilled tomatoes - would have been just the thing. Alice and her pals had already patiently tolerated a term or more of this - and a couple of the kids with 'foodie-snob' parents (not Alice!) had really enjoyed it, never having been introduced to the something tasty, cheap and quick-on-toast concept at home!
However, the lesson which caused the controversy was quite late on in the year, and was supposed to be 'making a full meal from scratch'. IIRC Alice said some sort of pasta dish was selected as the basis for the lesson which she initially thought was a good choice as different people could use, or omit, different things according to preference or requirements, but they'd all be going through the same basic steps. However the ingredient list consisted entirely of packets and tins - even the optional cheese sauce was a packet one, and there was no actual cheese used at all, even for 'finishing' or serving. TBH I think young Alice and her friends would've been better off leading the class themselves for some of the lessons!

 

[Oldhippy]

Surely the parents have the main responsibility over the schools? If you have children the onus must be on them to teach the basics.

 

[winjim]

I remember back in my youth my dad was working away from home and in self catering accommodation for a while. He'd never been near a cooker, other than to install one. My mum had written him a card with things like "potatoes, cut into X-inch chunks, boil XX min. Rice ..." etc. I asked her to do the same for me. It was pinned up in my bedsit.

I have friends who get frustrated that their husbands can't cook or carry out any other domestic tasks like using a washing machine. There's a certain cohort of men who have gone straight from living with their parents with their mum doing all that for them, to being married and expecting their wives to do it all. Now that might have worked BITD when traditional gender roles were the norm and we still had 'housewife' as the expected female career, but nowadays...

 

[battered]

I kind of think that if you're the kind of family that has the wherewithal, in terms of time, money and skills, to cook from fresh the majority of the time, then you're probably going to pass that down to your kids anyway. So they aren't the ones we need to target. We need to teach kids basic skills, not fancy chef stuff. You've got an hour a week to teach thirty kids how to cook? Good luck with that.

Exactly right. Education, like many things, falls neatly into a triage system. Some are going to get it anyway, all you have to do is point them at it and keep them interested, some are a lost cause and you are wasting your time trying. In the middle are all the rest. These are the ones that you really need to teach. Critically you need to stop them sliding off the back into the no hopers, and if you can drag a few no hopers kicking and screaming into the bottom end of the middle group, then that's a bonus.

 

[KnittyNorah]

Good for her. What did she do to help the children from the local estate who didn't bring any ingredients in at all because they didn't have it at home and their parents didn't give them to money to go and buy them?

I would like to ask you - as an adult, not as a 15 yo - what the food industry is doing to help prevent food poverty in areas where many of the basic ingredients which enable them to make such huge profits often at the expense of the health of the population, are produced by low-wage earners and their families.

Alice and my friend live very rurally in an area of large scale arable farming and horticulture where wages are low and a large percentage of the population are recent immigrants without fluent English, living in substandard housing in villages with no public transport.
Poor people there don't live 'on local estates' - there are none as city dwellers know them - they share cramped multi-family or multi-generational accommodation, and there is nowhere for anyone - rich or poor - to go and buy packets and tins at short notice without having their own transport.
So the list of shop-bought ingredients was largely inaccessible to all without significant notice at least, and all of it was provided by the school although naturally pupils were welcome to bring in their own stuff if they wished. or were able.
Poor people in that sort of area are much more likely to have access to fruits and vegetables which are discarded either accidentally or deliberately for a range of reasons, or which are available 'for the picking' and a blind eye turned to it at least occasionally and on a small scale. Alice knew perfectly well that the kids from the poorest families would have much easier access to that sort of stuff than to a jar of this, a tin of that, two packets of the other.
As one of the lucky ones with a mother who at least worked , albeit as a cook (not precisely a high-salary profession unless one is a celebrity cook ...), by standing up to the teacher who was clearly an entrenched townie, she was actually standing up for the poorest of the children in her class, and others who will doubtless come after her. In an area of extensive arable farming and horticulture, a bunch of basic veggies can often be picked up literally off the road- or at least off farm driveways as they exit to the road, while waiting for the school bus in the morning, or while walking home from the bus in the afternoon.

 

[KnittyNorah]

Surely the parents have the main responsibility over the schools? If you have children the onus must be on them to teach the basics.

I agree wholeheartedly - but it seems that schools nowadays are expected by a great many people to take responsibility for teaching everything, from taking one's coat on and off, through use of a knife and fork and flushing the toilet, to advanced calculus. Hopefully in the right order, but I sometimes wonder ...