Basic cookery a must in schools, says Watts
Cookery lessons should be an essential part of the national curriculum, according to Steven Watts, managing director of Scolarest.
Speaking in London last week, at a conference called Tackling Obesity in Young People, he said: "If we don't teach youngsters how to prepare and cook a home-made meal from scratch, how can we expect them to eat well, or know how to eat well?
"I believe that teaching kids about food and diet is as important today as teaching them maths, physics or chemistry. Cookery is a basic life skill we all need for survival and success."
But according to the Department for Education and Skills, putting cookery lessons back on the curriculum in schools isn't on the agenda. A spokesman said: "We have no plans to make cooking compulsory, as we want to give schools greater flexibility to address the needs of individual pupils."
He said food technology was part of the design and technology curriculum compulsory in primary schools. It includes some food handling and cookery skills.
Watts also said that providing free fruit and vegetables in schools would improve children's diets, and that secondary school children would eat more healthily if vegetables and fruit were cheaper. Scolarest has cut the price of healthy options and made vegetables free in some schools.
However, he believed that changing children's eating habits required a softly-softly approach. "We know cutting levels of salt, fat and sugar intake is the key to reducing obesity," he said, "but we do need to be careful that we don't go overboard and turn off our kids with nutritious menus that they won't eat. I won't get youngsters up to my counter with spinach and tofu lasagne, because they simply won't buy it."
Watts said that schoolkids wanted to eat pizza, curry, burgers, and fish and chips, but caterers and suppliers needed to improve the quality of these products. He added that healthy dishes had a better chance of being chosen if they were positioned first in the queue, and they also needed to be packaged attractively.