The government of the United Kingdom are to bring back compulsory cookery lessons to UK secondary schools. Is this too late to address the ever-increasing obesity in our children?

What happened to cookery as a school subject in the first place…the government cut out all Domestic Science subjects from State schooling way back in the 1970’s and re named the slot Food Technology…in other words the kids were taught to design food labels for products and draw food as a design subject. No cooking skills were ever taught again.

Recently some schools, now depleted of the wonderfully equipped Domestic Science laboratories that the gas and electric companies subsidised after the war, have started to teach ‘cooking’ again.

‘Jamie came home from school proudly carrying his baked beans on toast in a plastic box’

The fact that Jamie is 14 and baked beans on toast are hardly cooking did not damp his mother’s pride!


A very long time ago. at the age of 13 I had my first domestic science lesson. The night before I had to shop for 1 herring whole, raid the sparse larder for 2 ounces of course oatmeal and 1 ounce of lard and one egg.
My first lesson was gutting and preparing a whole herring for my dad’s tea. It was a big herring and we were all terrified of passing out when the knives were thrust into the belly to gut the disgusting things. Actually they weren’t as bad as we expected…it was fun and interesting and wonder of wonders, fresh fish smell of…. well fish! The filleted herrings were dipped in egg and coated in oatmeal then fried crisp and light brown in the lard.

Dad was delighted with his tea and the following week we had to buy another herring…this time we needed an onion, a bay leaf and peppercorns, sugar and vinegar. We made soused herrings (rollmops) now that was something! I loved all the lessons on Friday afternoons, cooking, washing, cleaning, childcare all the things one needed to know to make a home and bring a family up well and happy. I wanted to be a domestic science teacher.


Whatever happened to all those young ladies who also wanted to teach this subject, when it was dropped they must have been as gutted as our herrings.. Absorbed into a second rate education system where no one specialised any more.

No doubt they will scour the country for teachers qualified to teach cookery….impossible!
They will be teaching making pizzas with ready mix..The ubiquitous baked beans on toast. A cringeable offence…as any decent cook knows culinary skills do not depend entirely on a tin opener. Cooking is an art and a specialised subject. It isn’t a tagged on skill acquired via 8 weeks of training. That is so totally unfair to our kids.

Yesterday I asked about how recession may affect the business of Personal Chefs. Well here is a perfect opportunity.

If like me, a chef has a full quota of equipment and can take a cookery demonstration anywhere, who better to teach children the skills required to cook a weeks meals for the family and pack and store these safely? Who better to teach economic marketing skills than the cooks that serve families all over the world making mealtimes a great pleasure and nutritionally beneficial. We all have contacts with catering equipment rental companies and being a Sessional lecturer to schools and colleges is the most economical way the education authorities can introduce new curriculum subjects.


We have had our family values systematically eroded by government policies in the UK for the past 40 years. What has it done to benefit our land…feral gangs of children that are welcome nowhere, especially at home? The only things they have that relate to a home kitchen are the carving knives they carry as weapons.

The 8 hours in 1 term between the ages of 11-14 is not enough to teach the lost art of nutrition and cookery that our children have been denied by our fast track way of life. Working all hours of the day and often nights too, to pay taxes and obscenely high living costs here does not allow parents the time to have a life let alone teaching life skills to children. Cookery is not a Design and Technology subject…it is part of the old fashioned domestic science that served us all so well and gave us all we needed to be proud to make a home for our families.

We have such a high number of teenage single parents in this country that domestic science might well give them some pride in themselves and make the situation these girls find themselves in something that can be built on, rather than depending on state handouts and the company of the previously mentioned feral males. It might even go a long way to making them think twice about breeding so early and so irresponsibly! Perhaps it would re-establish the family unit as the best place to bring up children once again.

Fay