Sad but these important (IMHO) life skill course were important. The cut back due to cost is these courses do not contribute to the final on paper result.

When I did cooking, sewing, woodwork, metalwork and automobile repair/maintenance the school system had the funds for the food, sewing notions, wood, metal.

These courses are useless unless there is hands on experience and the cost of material probably did not endear it to the bean counters.

Just curious. Lunch.

Has lunch been a very significant part of any other posters lives? I'm thinking of where productive work is regularly "over lunch"? Or as in my case where my own business was largely carried out over lunch that I'd prepared personally for clients?

I wonder how prevalent it is.

Lunch is important to me, but it's downtime. No sandwiches, no eating at the desk, and no work talk.

how to scramble an egg? break shell, dump contents into heated pan.

I made a box in metal shop, tried making a bowl in wood shop but it fell off the lathe and cracked, made smudgy silkscreen Christmas cards in Print shop, blueprints in drafting and made friends with all the bullies who were there to learn their future trades. I'd have traded it all for 8 weeks of cupcake and fudge lessons.

I find it a little hard to believe that someone who hitherto has shown zero interest in cooking would enrol in a 600 pound, four day course to learn how to cut an onion or scramble an egg. It's equally hard to believe that such instruction takes four days. Do they also learn how to unscramble the egg?

I think there is a general idea among the public that cooking is difficult, and requires instruction to master. Tthe cooking shows and classes further this perception, making people hesitant to even try.

When I first moved out by myself, I just googled a few recipes, got a cookbook from the library, and used recipes printed on the packages of various foods. I quickly picked up some basics and went from there.

Putting ingredients together to make a meal is less complicated than using a smartphone, which most of us learned through trial and error, without taking any classes, asking anyone for assistance, or even looking at a manual.

If you want to learn to cook yourself, I suggest you buy a simple cookbook, pick a recipe, go out and buy the ingredients, and try it yourself. It may not turn out well the first time. Make modifications and try it again. Then pick another recipe, rinse and repeat. Within a couple of months you will have the basics down and you will be able to make meals for yourself and your family with little effort.

Do student halls typically have cooking facilities these days? That was where I really had to learn. I'd done quite a bit before (taught particularly by my grandfather) but it was in halls that I had to cook for myself and others - there was a communal kitchen on each floor in each block with nothing but a Baby Belling and a fridge, and some basic utensils left behind by previous occupants (you could top up for very cheap from Woolies). You'd generally help each other out, and learn an awful lot in doing so.

But I get the impression most modern halls are all ensuite (luxury!) and the expectation is that you'll eat at a canteen or, at a push, from a microwave. Is this the case?

I agree, though, that cooking is nothing to be scared of. There is a certain mentality among people that you can't do anything that involves techniques you're not aware of without being trained by some expert.

Heh....

Boys had 1 week of "home ec" in junior high.

I was making some caramel from sugar, and the recipe said "heat sugar to 375 in heavy pan," so I heated the heavy pan up and dumped the sugar in.

It turns out that sugar rapidly converts to carbon.... and copious amounts of smoke... when heated immediately to high temperatures.

The recipe failed to note you should perform the process gradually.

They only had to evacuate that wing of the building for a few minutes.

I seem to be in a minority here. At middle school in the 80s, we had 4h/week of "arts and crafts" which varied term to term, but broadly it was Home Ec (basically cookery and needlwork), Art (both painting and sculpture) and Woodwork/Metalwork (it takes a teacher with nerves of steel to let 10-year-old loose on a bandsaw). Girls and boys were expected to do the same.

I did also spend a year in France when I was 10-11, and we had some serious cookery classes at school there. I remember being told off for cracking an egg on the side of the bowl, and shown how to crack it with a knife to give you a perfect shell for separating, and minimising the possibility of getting fragments in the mix.

Agreed. I think they'll be just fine (especially if they can learn to Google "how do I cook x" instead of shelling out piles of money to learn how to scramble eggs).

I think it's very much age dependent. I attended middle school at roughly the same time you did, and both boys and girls took the same "art" classes -- including everything from cooking to sewing to painting to woodworking. Ten years before that it was pretty common for arts classes to be separated by gender, with boys learning "industrial arts" and girls learning "home arts".

The problem is that learning to cook from online recipes doesn't teach someone who knows nothing about the most basic cookery skills, how to follow the recipe and cook. It provides the ingredients and a shopping list for those that have the basic skills but without them most people that do try often make a hash of it and give up. It's the basic skills that kids no longer learn from watching mum or granny or in my kids case their dad in the kitchen.

If you haven't peeled a potato or sliced onions or fried a piece of meat, fry an egg, boil an egg, use a tin opener, etc then many of the recipes still present obstacles to those without any of even the most basic cooking skills that most reading these threads take for granted.

It seems to me that - in particular all these TV cheffy programmes - that the combined and converging trends to focus on daft osbscure ingredients, an unbalanced focus on perfect presentation but very little basic ( ie Delia Smith) cooking and prep skills discourages most that even give it a try pretty early on. When they produce a poor meal that also looks nothing like the cheffy picture it's to easy to reach back to the complete meal on the supermarket shelf. It's human nature.

To me it is the lack of the most basic skills and now having a whole new generation growing whose parents didn't cook - and so they do not know the joy of real home food and family meals that has all but dissapeared which is causing the vacuum.

I'm not sure why there's so much discussion on the role of home ec in schools-shouldn't the fundamentals of cooking come in the house kitchen? It just seems to me that there are two big points for those of us growing up now-there's always some form of digital media we use instead of learning things around the house (because you can always keep a kid occupied with TV), and there is a little less cooking going on in the home today. It seems today that the initiative for learning to cook is shifted more towards the child than previous, and if the child would rather watch TV/spend time on the internet or there is little cooking done at home, then the child will have no incentive to learn to cook. I just think there's just less interest in cooking (or anything associated with independent living) until you have to live independently and fend for yourself.

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If someone doesn't know how to chop a ruddy onion then they deserve to go hungry. Paying money to be shown how to chop it correctly is crazy.....mad fools.