There are lots of things I admire about Jamie Oliver, for whom I finally fell when I interviewed him for the second time (the first time, he was young and bumptious and I didn’t take to him at all). But perhaps the quality I relish most is his stubbornness, his absolute refusal to shut up when he cares about something. On and on he goes, and if people are bored half to death or feel they’re being hectored, then tough. For instance: on the subject of the government’s compulsory cookery lessons, which became part of the national curriculum last year. What does Oliver have to say about them? Pleased as he is that they exist at all, he’s still not happy: “The cookery lessons … are not measured or evaluated,” he said recently. “Not all teachers know what’s required. We are seeing everything from schools rewriting their entire curriculum around food to schools that say, ‘We do a bit of cooking … we make fairy cakes in year one.’”
I’ve no way of knowing if this is true. My gang of nieces and nephews are mostly too miniature to comprise much of a focus group at present. But even if he’s only half right – and why would he exaggerate? – this spells doom to me. A subject that’s badly taught will always be vulnerable to messing from above. Teach the making of fairy cakes, in other words, and it won’t be long before someone, not without justification, says: “Why do kids need to know how to make fairy cakes? Wouldn’t they be better off spending more time learning to code?” And thus, another generation leaves school without knowing how to roast a chicken, or even how to boil an egg.
But then, cooking has always been marginalised in our schools. It was in my mother’s day, and it was in mine. As I read Oliver’s rant, I thought of Mrs X, the terrifying old bat who taught me “cooking”. Notice the inverted commas. What I remember most about Mrs X’s lessons (besides the shouting) was their quite outstanding feebleness, a brazen inadequacy that not only fuelled my massive resentment that the boys were not required to participate (while we tied on our aprons, they went off with their protractors to do metalwork and CDT), but also reinforced the widely held and wholly misplaced conviction that home economics was, in our school as in many others, a subject for the really dim.
What do I mean by feeble? Well, it will tell you all you need to know if I reveal that the first thing we made was a “cheesy potato” (a jacket potato whose insides we’d removed and combined with grated red cheddar), and the second thing a cheese and potato “pie” (in essence, the filling of the previous week’s jacket potato, only this time spread across a glass dish). I remember vividly bringing home this delight to my sceptical mother. Not even the sprig of parsley that sat jauntily in its centre could disguise the fact that we’d “made” the same thing two lessons in a row. Week three was coleslaw, and week four was a chocolate blancmange of cornflour and cocoa powder, decorated with tinned mandarins and Dream Topping. This pudding having predictably failed to set, there followed an embarrassing incident when I insisted on carrying it on to the top of the number 51 bus: when the driver hit the brakes before I’d managed to sit down, it swiftly departed my mother’s Pyrex for the lap of the woman in the next seat. We did, one week, make a very rudimentary loaf of bread – not even the birds were keen on mine, which sat on the outhouse roof for at least a week – and I think there was at least one dish involving a sausage. But we cooked no omelette, no pasta, no fish or joint of meat: nothing, in other words, that would be of any use in our future lives.
The lessons were, for us, a joke. Although Mrs X was generally agreed to be a tyrant, we still thought of home economics as a time mostly for messing about – and as soon as we hit the fourth form and O levels, we ditched it faster than you could say “Phil Oakey”. Even RE, we felt, was more use than HE, and only marginally less of a doss. Result: until I was about 24, I could rattle off the books of the Old Testament far more easily than I could make something edible for supper. I hope that Oliver is wrong. People are dying for want of some basic skills, and will continue to do so unless these lessons are taken seriously. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he turned out to be right. Cheesy potatoes, fairy cakes: all that separates them is the years, and our ever-growing addiction to sugar.
