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Ideas for Scotland
No 2

Cooking for three year olds

Rose Galt

In February this year, the public health minister, Shona Robison, announced an initiative to work with interested parties to tackle the 'timebomb' of obesity in Scotland. The problem is massive and potentially catastrophic and the evidence of the need to take action is stark: currently obesity costs Scotland £457m a year, a sum that is growing exponentially; the present generation of children is statistically the first likely to die before their parents; the NHS is staggering under the weight of the problem. Walk through any supermarket and observe the fat parents with their fat children pushing trolleys laden with unhealthy food. And last week I read that the Jubilee Hospital in Clydebank had been internationally recognised as a centre for excellence in the fitting of gastric bands.
     So what does the government in Holyrood propose? It lists removing sweets and fizzy drinks from school vending machines, smaller portions and fewer chips in school canteens, asking businesses to 'encourage' staff to eat more healthily and supermarkets to remove sweets from checkouts. Oh, and there was the usual bit about 'encouraging' more exercise. Opposition parties suggested adding a programme of nutritional advice to parents.
     All these measures are to be welcomed, though the likelihood of their success might be judged by the lukewarm response of the head of the Scottish Retail Federation to any suggestion that there should be any interference in 'the individual's right to choose' or indeed the dramatic fall in the uptake of school meals since they became more healthy. So my point is that the government's suggestions are both inadequate and unimaginative. Worse they are essentially flawed for two reasons: firstly they focus on a generation which I believe is already lost and secondly they are based on seeing children as passive consumers rather than active creators. My idea then is a radical overhaul of the way we educate our children in this crucial area by adopting a compulsory 'hands on' approach from the earliest possible age.
     
What would this mean in practice? From the age of three all children would cook. Watch them do it on Cbbc. It's fabulous.
     Formal exams in cookery – and PE – would be abolished as the ultimate kiss of death, unless they were practical i.e. the presentation of a meal, not a rehash of the calorific count of spaghetti Bolognese.
     Theory should be left till much later and incorporated in context. Instead schools would counter the insidious propaganda of the food industry that cooking should be avoided as boring and useless. Just as pharmaceutical companies have sold us dubious and expensive drugs through skilful advertising to fill their bloated coffers, so the food giants and the huge supermarket chains not only flog us sugar- and sodium-laden food to the detriment of our health, but – worse – they subtly imply that time spent cooking is not only wasted but unenjoyable. And I'm afraid that schools with their emphasis on 'quick' meals have colluded. Schools must positively promote cooking as the opposite of a chore. Imagine catch-up TV being marketed as allowing you to watch what you missed while enjoying yourself cooking or eating with your family.
     I spent over 20 years of my life in active service to both my school and my union. During these years I almost always cooked dinner when I got home. We ate at the table, TV off, and talked. It might have been 8pm or later, but I wouldn't have missed these occasions for all the convenience food in the world. My daughter is both a PhD and a brilliant cook – and slim.
     Let's decide now to celebrate the making of good, varied, healthy food in our homes by starting and continuing with our pupils in schools. They will then hopefully grow up to have and pass on a different attitude to food and cooking than their parents; to stop indoctrinating their children into seeing chocolate as a 'treat' if they eat up their nasty vegetables.
     The sine qua non is the enthusiastic adoption of a 'hands-on' approach. Let's have end-of-term cooking challenges along with sports: half-hour one-pot meals, two-course meals for two for a fiver, make liver palatable. The possibilities for a generation of children brought up from the age of three or four to cook with pleasure are endless and exciting. Few of us can paint like Monet, write music like Beethoven or play the trumpet like Humph. But most of us can create – yes, create – delicious, varied and nutritious food for our families.What could be better than that? I even have a slogan for this super campaign:
     Cooking – the best fun you can have standing up with your clothes on.

Tomorrow: George Gunn

Rose Galt is past-president of the Educational Institute of Scotland