KITCHEN CONFIDENCE
by Sarah Catherall
The Dominion Post
When 11 and 12-year-olds turn up to Mt Cook School for cooking classes, many don't know how to use a peeler or find their way around a kitchen. Their teacher, Jason Cadwallader, is stunned that his three-year-old daughter is better able to help prepare a dinner than some of the pupils that come to his kitchen. "Some are pretty useless. They come in and it's obvious that some of them have never done very much at home. Some kids will wipe down a dirty plate and put it back in the cupboard," he says.
"I had a group of year 7 pupils in here yesterday making pikelets and I asked them, 'how do we turn an oven on?' and they had no idea." Gone are the days when children stood by the kitchen sink and pitched in to help peel the potatoes or cut a lettuce.
Foodies and cooking teachers say parents are too busy to rope in their offspring and culinary skills are becoming a dying art. If research conducted for Wattie's is anything to go by, children are more confident loading software or sending a text message than cooking a basic meal from a recipe. According to the survey of 439 kids aged eight to 14, many were only able to make toast and a sandwich. Few could boil an egg or peel a potato.
In her Brooklyn villa on a Wednesday afternoon, Maria Pia de Razza-Klein is doing her best to buck a trend, teaching children to make sourdough bread. The feisty Italian chef famous for her Thorndon trattoria throws her arms in the air as children leave her cooking class to attend music lessons. "Children are too busy," she raves. "Do you know what I did after school when I was a girl? Nothing."
She's running one of the few private cooking classes for children in the Wellington region - which, according to nutritionists, are well overdue. Several of the children here today are year 7 and 8 pupils from Brooklyn School across the road. They attend Mt Cook School each Thursday for cooking, sewing and woodwork lessons. The only boy, 11-year-old Andre Gordon, is a keen cook and baker.
The young foodies have watched the 57-year-old make sourdough bread, and they've had a lecture about everything from seasonal food and organic rice to how to soak up almond oil with hunks of bread as an afternoon snack. "Remember something," she says, as they crowd around her kitchen table. "Try everything. You are young and you must say, 'I'm so excited'.
"Parents are too busy and if they bake with their kids, they might do some cookies," she says. "There is a new generation that doesn't know how to cook. "They make easy-peasy stuff or buy takeaways, and those cooking skills that we grew up with don't exist any more.
It's true, if the results of a British study are replicated here. It found that one-fifth of mothers rarely or never taught their children to cook, because they weren't confident about their own culinary skills. In New Zealand schools, year 7 and 8 pupils learn to make scones, smoothies and lasagne, and older pupils can opt to take food technology.
However, Wattie's nutrition manager Julie Dick is concerned that school cooking kitchens closed in the 80s and 90s to make way for computer suites. Running Wattie's Project Cook, which targets 1600 intermediate schools, she says children from the age of nine have the skills to start learning to cook and the company's research shows that's when they want to start. "There has been a focus on technology and computer skills and less on core skills. We're trying to bring that back and make cooking fun.
MARGARET Brooker, a Wellington food writer, wonders if families are sitting down and enjoying the ritual of dining together like they used to. "With a lot of mums working, the cooks of the household are taking shortcuts and so those skills aren't being passed on," the author of My Turn to Cook (New Holland $25) says.
Maybe the situation is changing again, as there's a new trend among schools and preschools to build vegetable gardens, assisted by a Health Ministry nutrition fund. South Wellington Intermediate has received a government grant to grow vegetables, and principal Mike Debner says cooking is compulsory for its pupils. It won't be long before the fund is targeted at low-decile areas and schools like South Wellington Intermediate will have to find the money themselves, Garry Szeto, co-ordinator of Hutt Valley Health's healthy action and eating project, believes. He points out the merit of growing, harvesting and preparing food. "Pupils are learning the whole process from start to finish. For younger children in early childhood settings, it means they can learn to be independent and help out, rather than the food just arriving on their plate.
* Dominion Post food writer Alison Holst is joining a campaign to encourage children to learn to cook. Potatoes New Zealand is launching its Calling All Grandparents campaign during the second week of these school holidays, providing recipes and ideas in English, Maori and Samoan. Urging grandparents to teach their mokopuna to bake a potato, Mrs Holst said: "Fewer and fewer children are learning to cook but I think it is so important. A baked potato, with all the goodness it contains, is an excellent place to start."
And now it's my turn...
I could talk about this subject for hours (and do sometimes, much to the dismay of who-ever is probably listening...usually my poor partner, Andrew!)...I swear, nothing makes me more frustrated than seeing the packets of pre-prepared crap going into families' supermarket trolleys. And to know that these parents are dictating such a sad course for their children's' futures. I mean, forget obesity and type 2 diabetes, what about the simple pleasures of cooking for yourself and enjoying both the process and the product? What about knowing how to feed yourself and knowing what the hell you're putting into your bodies? What about knowing where your food has come from and what has gone into it? It really angers me that kids aren't taught how to cook. I was cooking entire meals for my family from the age of 10. We were a single parent family and Mum worked, so I helped out. But it was fun! It made me feel like a grown-up, which I'm sure helped my social development in other ways too, but it was fun! And linking in to this, Mum would let me help out with the grocery shopping - explaining as we went around the shop with our list how to weigh up which was the cheapest option, or why we picked certain products and not others. Teaching me to read the labels of things. And so by 15, Mum was quite happy to let me do the grocery shopping occasionally, if I wanted to. She let me help in the kitchen from a really young age - and I was always cooking, because so was she. And yes, ok, I'm sure there are parents out there who don't have those skills themselves - too many of them, probably - but if you're a parent, shouldn't you learn how to do it so you can pass on the skills to your kids? It's also horribly sad that schools have gotten rid of the cooking classes they used to have. If the parents aren't teaching the kids at home, then surely schools could be helping to sustain the next generation by at least giving them one chance a week to get in the kitchen?? Arrgh. Ok, as I said, I could go on about this for hours, but I'd better stop here. Otherwise I'll be ranting all day!
Oh, but post-script...yes, I caught the cringe-factor in the above article where the "food writer" explains that the problem is because Mums are working. As I described above, my Mum worked and was very busy but still taught me everything I needed to know. But, and here's the important part, my Dad also cooked. He cooked a lot at home before my parents split up, and when my brother and I would go to his place for dinner afterwards, he'd still cook and would let us help out. My obsession with cooking and food is one that I share with my brother - who is a real boys boy, by the way. This is not a simple matter of supposedly shifting gender roles and to start pointing the finger at working mothers just evades the real crux of the matter! Grrr!
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