CHOICE FOR CHILDREN
Introduction to cooking
Let all schools teach children how to cook and enjoy good food.
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PEOPLE HAVE worried about food since we first stood upright. Until very
recently the anxiety was how to get any. Of course, for many nations it
still is. But, for us in the Western world, worrying about how it is raised,
gathered, processed and eaten, and what to do with the Euromountains of
it, is a luxury. Nevertheless, something that we put into our bodies at
least twice a day, and on which we depend for our existence, health and
happiness, is worth worrying about.
The National Farmers' Union (NFU) is rightly concerned about the utter
lack of understanding of farming by townees. They want to do something
about inner-city children who do not know that carrots grow underground
and whose reaction to the information that milk comes out of the teats
of cows is horrified disbelief followed by puking noises and a vow to
stick to Coca-Cola!
The NFU has started an admirable initiative, called Farms for Schools.
Farmers offer visits to schoolchildren, and show them something of real
country life. It is a wonderful programme and, if it spread, could mean
that in a single generation we could reverse the trend of increasing ignorance
and hostility to farmers.
Anyone who remembers one's first visit to see lambs or newly-born calves
will remember the pleasure of stroking them, and of having one's fingers
sucked - and what a pleasure it was! Farmers will certainly let their
children stroke the calves and have their fingers licked, or collect eggs
from under a hen. But these things are not recommended by schools. Teachers
are instructed: "Do not allow children to touch the animals or have
their fingers sucked by them."
Why not? If the concern is that the children will pass disease to the
animals, this is taken care of with the instruction "Children must
wash their hands before the start of the visit." If the problem is
that the animals will pass disease to the children, this is taken care
of with "Children must wash their hands under hot running water,
using a suitable detergent and a disposable paper towel, after contact
with animals."
What exactly are we frightened of here? I am not diminishing the dangers
of e-coli, for all such dangers are rather more probable than winning
the lottery. But, when you are ten years old, having to have a surgical
scrub-down two minutes after being licked by a newborn lamb seems crazy.
Hygiene overkill is not the NFU's fault of course. They have consulted
the expert, the Environmental Health Officer, and he or she is interpreting
regulations with diligence.
Food scares are the stuff of tabloid journalism. In the last year there
have been articles about the danger of fat, sugar, bran, nuts, eggs, meat,
orange juice, chocolate, margarine, herbal drinks, wine, and even vitamins;
and most of them are reversed as soon as they've thoroughly shaken the
cook's, or the diner's, confidence.
I wish we would concentrate, on hygiene matters, on training, and not on knee-jerk regulation in response to an outbreak of food poisoning. If cooks of the future understand what makes bugs grow, they will be able to make sensible decisions to minimize the risk of food poisoning. I would rather help the cooks to understand that hot water is their best defence against germs, instead of buying unnecessary sanitizers and germicidal concoctions which do the environment no good while simultaneously building resistance in the bugs.
THE SCHOOLS OF THE twenty-first century should teach hands-on cooking
to all children.
Most mums and dads cannot cook. And those that can often don't have the
time to. Only 30% of families ever sit down to a meal together. And what
cooking skills there are, are not getting passed down to children. 60%
of fourteen-year-olds have never boiled an egg.
Even in middle-class families, who are more likely to have a knees-under
meal (as I said, 70% of households never do), most children don't help
with the cooking. Many boil their first potato when they go to university.
And yet cookbooks stream off the presses; until the Harry Potter phenomenon,
cookbooks were every publisher's best bet. Carlton tv alone has ninety-three
networked food programmes. TV chefs have replaced rock stars as fodder
for the gossip columns.
But primary school teachers will tell you that five-year-olds are arriving
at school unable to use a knife, fork or spoon. They graduate from a fish
finger in the hand to a burger in the hand.
The fact is that the TV cooks are watched by everyone as entertainment.
Very few people write in for the fact sheets or recipes. We are watching
tv instead of cooking - admiring Gary Rhodes make magic with scallops
and lemon grass while eating take-away pizzas.
Recently a taxi driver said to me: "You are that cooking woman aren't
you?" "Yes," I said, flattered to be recognized. "How
did you know?"
"Oh, I love cooking. It's my favourite pastime."
"Great," I said. "What sort of cooking do you do?"
"Do? Oh, I don't do any cooking. I watch it on TV."
Cooking is now a spectator sport. "I like cooking" means "I
like Jamie Oliver," just as "I like football" means "I
like Arsenal".
Nearly 30% of children say they have no desire to taste anything new.
Only 24% would like to learn to cook their own food. This lack of interest
in cooking contrasts strongly with the experience of every home economics
or food technology teacher, of every chef who has ever given a food or
cookery class, of every parent who fobs off a four-year-old's clamour
to "Let me help" with "You lay the table, darling; I'm
in a hurry."
I am convinced that children's apathy stems from absolute lack of opportunity. If you don't know what you are missing, you don't miss it.
THE FACT IS children love to cook. It's like mud pies or playdough, with
something to eat at the end of it. I've never yet met a child who did
not enjoy cooking. Even the twelve-year-old boys, hanging back in a sulk
and refusing to join in, love it once they get their hands in the flour.
I was teaching in a really difficult school the other day, and it took
half an hour to get the children calm enough to listen to all the Health
and Safety stuff we needed to go through. They were so busy punching each
other and saying "Urrgh, that's disgusting" and "Yuk, I'm
not eating that stuff." We just could not calm them down.
But once they were actually cooking, making bread with yeast, spicy samosas
and spring rolls, and marble salads and fresh pasta, you would not have
believed they were the same children. They worked hard all day, and when
it came to asking for volunteers to turn up the next day to make snacks
for the parents' evening (more samosas, spring rolls, mini pizzas etc.),
every one of the twenty-one children in the class wanted to come.
In my experience, the best way to get children to try new foods is to
cook with them. One mother was near to tears, and really angry. She said,
"Michelle is twelve years old and I have never been able to get her
to eat any vegetables except package peas and chips. And here she is raving
about a spring roll containing fresh ginger, chillies, leeks, carrots
and cabbage." But Michelle had made that spring roll.
One in six children never prepare any food themselves. Those that do, make sandwiches and toast. In a recent Mori poll the nearest to a cooked meal cited by children who claimed to cook was beans on toast. 40% of children have, by way of breakfast, a chocolate bar or a packet of crisps on the way to school. The one glimmer of hope is that among the few children who did want to cook, Sunday lunch was high on the list of what they wanted to learn to do. This surprised me. I thought children forced to sit still while the grown-ups nattered, might long for hot dogs in front of the EastEnders Omnibus or Sunday Grandstand. And maybe they do. But it seems children aren't daft. They reckon they might get a bit of Mum or Dad's time and attention if only they weren't competing with the telly. And however argumentative Sunday lunch is, it is a great opportunity for the young to learn to rub along with others. If nothing else, they might learn what I'm told are called Negotiating Skills and Conflict Resolution! If children never talk to their elders, should we be surprised that they have no sympathy for them?
WHEN AT THE RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts Manufactures
and Commerce) we held the first lectures on the subject, there was an
overwhelming response from RSA fellows - not just from the educationalists
among them, but from parents, sociologists, nutritionists and political
economists. There are very good arguments for getting food and cooking
taken more seriously in schools, not just for children interested in a
career in the food industry, but for everyone.
They told us that cooking was a perfect vehicle for teaching all those
qualities we keep saying we want in children: creativity, flexibility,
working in teams, decision-making, exercise of judgement, evaluation of
risk, etc. Others told us that:
- history can be brought alive with food studies: think of the tea clippers or spice trade;
- tolerance and understanding of other ethnic races could be fostered by learning about the way other people eat (why Muslims don't eat pork; why so many Hindus are vegetarians);
- maths is made real when you have to weigh and measure, double ingredients or halve them;
- literacy and understanding are helped by reading and writing recipes.
We badly need children to see the point of good nutrition. Britain is the fattest nation in Europe, with one of the highest rates of heart attack.
Teaching about nutrition on a computer is not as effective as getting
children to enjoy healthy food. Recent studies have shown that children
know perfectly well what is good for them. But they are not offered it,
and they do not know how to get it for themselves. Many don't like it,
never having been brought up with it.
But, most of all, cooking and eating are the means to allow people of
different generations to do things together, to talk to each other, to
understand each other, and to have fun.
According to economist Suzi Leather, there has never been a society in any part of the world that did not prepare and eat its food in some sort of community. But our generation in the "developed" West is the first to eat alone: in the street, in front of the telly, at our desks. She reckoned that we throw out the ritual of working together and sharing at our peril.
AS A RESULT of all this debate the RSA set up the Focus on Food Campaign with the aims of enhancing food and cooking in schools and getting the subject made compulsory. The campaign is now in its third year.
2,000 schools are involved, mainly in Focus on Food week when they cook
for a week! They do all sorts of things: run a pizza parlour in the school
instead of the school canteen, work with a local restaurant to design
and cook menus, study and cook the food of an ethnic minority in the school,
and so on. 150,000 children have had a chance to get their hands in the
flour. (Why is it, by the way, that, in British schools, food technology
and home economics are the only subjects where the parents have to pay
for the materials? Paint and paper, clay and plaster are supplied in art
classes, chemicals in science. But last year the average amount of money
spent on food per child per year by schools that did home economics was
88p).
Then we have the Cooking Bus, which tours the country. When opened up
the bus becomes a fully equipped teaching kitchen for sixteen children,
who all make a meal, then sit down and eat it. For many, this is the first
time they have cooked, the first time they have eaten a fresh vegetable,
the first time they have sat at a dining table.
I hesitate, in front of Satish Kumar, to talk about a comprehensive food policy in schools. The Small School in Hartland is a model in this regard, making sure that the ethics and nutrition, health and hygiene taught in class are echoed in the way the pupils and staff are fed. They go further: children and staff cook together and eat together, and the social sharing of both the preparation and the eating of food is central to the Small School philosophy.
But I'm keen to show that at least some of that can work in a state comprehensive.
I am involved in a new school called Kings College for the Arts and Technology
in Guildford. Here we have a programme called Body and Soul, which involves
students, teachers, parents, support staff and governors in two things:
in learning to cook and eat, and in learning to sing.
There is a Whole School Policy. If good food is to be at the centre of
school life, everyone has to be signed up to see that it happens. For
example, we must ensure children who are taught in class about the benefits
of nutrition are not then fed chips and chocolate for lunch.
I am convinced that a lot of the bad behaviour in school is fuelled by
that sugar injection of a chocolate bar for breakfast. You only have to
watch young children arriving hyperactive, flagging at about eleven a.m.
as their sugar level drops, then impossible again after a can of coke
and more sweets at lunch.
Breakfast is offered at Kings College and children have mealtimes with
enough time to sit down for lunch in a pleasant restaurant. Food is freshly
cooked and provides a balanced diet. There is no tuck shop. We are determined
to avoid that age-old problem of the caterers offering healthy meals while
competing with the tuck shop run by well-meaning Friends of the School
to make money to buy a minibus.
We have adopted the highly successful Food Dudes nutrition programme
developed by Bangor University Psychology Department. I think this is
one of the most exciting things going on in the food world, which could
completely transform the way Britons eat. It is a programme to get children
to eat fruit and vegetables. It is based on the premise that children
reject fruit and vegetables not because they don't know what's good for
them (research shows that children know very well what they should eat)
- they just don't like them. And there is no incentive for them to try.
The theory is that such tastes are acquired and you need to make repeated
attempts to overcome a taste you don't like.
Remember the stalwart efforts we all made as kids to get to like beer
or cigarettes? We made those efforts because peer pressure told us it
was the "cool" thing to do. We wanted to get a taste for them.
And we kept going until we did. But parents no longer try veg and fruit
on their children. And the children cannot be persuaded, because most
of their received influences are negative: they are bombarded with advertising
extolling junk food, and peer pressure reinforces the negative attitude
to fruit and vegetables. In short, it is not "cool" to like
them.
So the Bangor team have devised a programme to incentivize children to
repeatedly try things even if they don't, at first, like them. They set
out to make fruit and veg desirable. And they reward children for eating
them. The intervention involves teachers, school caterers and parents.
Children are shown videos and they sing songs and follow the adventures
of the "Food Dudes" - a gang of hero characters who are fuelled
by fruit and veg. The "baddies" are the Junk Junta who try to
corrupt our heroes with unhealthy food. Children are rewarded with stickers
and stars if they choose to eat fruit and vegetables rather than chocolate
bars and chips (which are not taken away, by the way: the idea is free
choice).
The children are offered raw veg at break, cooked veg at lunch and raw
fruit for dessert. So if you eat a carrot you get a Food Dude carrot sticker
to put in your book. When you've eaten five portions of carrot you get
a Food Dude star, and so on.
The results so far, in primary schools in Oxfordshire and Wales, have
been astonishing. Children who never ate anything but chips are now happily
eating raw vegetables.
So how does it work? The Bangor University researchers go into a school
and offer the children fruit and veg alongside their usual fare. After
a two-week "intervention" with the Food Dudes as role models
and being rewarded for repeatedly trying the fruit and veg, children are
all eating the "five a day". Sometimes consumption is up 400%.
The truly astonishing thing is that after the two weeks are over and
there are no more Food Dudes and rewards, fruit and veg consumption does
not drop. In one school it did drop by 1.5% over a year, but in other
schools consumption actually rose in the year following the intervention.
Which figures, when you think about it. Once you get to like something,
you like it for life; and will go on eating it when offered. Just think
what that could do for the National Health bill if the scheme were adopted
in every primary school in Britain.
So far, the Bangor team has had brilliant results with babies, toddlers and primary school children. Kings College is the first secondary school to try it.
WE, AT THE BRITISH FOOD TRUST, believe that a National Centre for the
Culinary Arts will be a perfect way to tap into the enormous interest
in food. Our aim is to: "stimulate the awareness and involvement
of the general public in British food and cooking and to foster the production,
consumption and supply of good food." But what do we mean by good
food?
"Good food" means food that is likely to have many of the following
attributes:
- It tastes delicious
- It looks delicious
- It smells delicious
- It is wholesome
- It is fresh
- It is nutritious
- Eaten in moderation it will do no harm
- The producer would be proud to show the public his operation
- It has had minimal processing
- Chemicals or additives are absent or minimal
- Animals killed have suffered the least possible stress.
So, our purpose is to promote good food. But not by preaching. Our vision
of promoting good food starts and ends with enjoyability. And we intend
to do this by providing a good day out for the general public, by establishing
the Great British Kitchen. There will be a visitor attraction where people
will see replica historical kitchens in action, with actors and cooks
in costume making, let's say, millet cakes on the hearth of an iron-age
cave, monks in the apothecary kitchen, sugar being blown or pulled in
a Regency kitchen, a Victorian brew-house etc.
Then there will be a British Cookery college with three departments to
it: a chefs' school, a leisure learning kitchen for hobby cooks and a
junior cooks' school for children. There will be no fashion, or hi-fi
shops or McDonald's. All the units will be food or food-related, with
the largest space going to the British Foods Showcase, a shop emphasizing
the regional foods of Britain. Then there is a craft food yard, where
cheese-makers, pickle-makers, smokers and chocolate-makers will show their
craft to the public.
The entrance to all this will be a greenhouse full of rare varieties
of fruit and vegetable, where we hope, with the Royal Horticultural Institute,
to demonstrate how humans have manipulated nature over the years, breeding
(for example) a cob of maize a foot long, when its wild ancestor was less
than an inch, or showing side by side the leafy little wild cabbage plant
next to today's giant ones, solid as footballs.
The green in front of the Georgian building will host festivals, food
events, farmers' markets and gastronomic fairs. And we hope to do a community
project with some of the allotments behind the site, turning them into
historical vegetable gardens to match the historical kitchens.
Needless to say, we are a long way off yet. We are setting up in Stafford,
where we have been supported by the regional development agency and the
Stafford Borough Council - who between them have bought the site for us.
With luck we'll open in 2004.
I really hope we can pull off the Great British Kitchen. My main fear is that the local environmental health officer will decree that the children cannot taste what they make, and that the Victorian brew-house will have to be made of plastic and disinfected hourly!
The above excerpts are from a talk given at the Resurgence Summer Camp 2000.
For information on Kings College for the Arts and Technology, Guildford
tel: 01483 458956. For information on the Great British Kitchen, tel: 020 7221 5282.Prue Leith's latest novel Sisters is being published by Penguin Books.