My grade eight home-ec teacher made us wash the outside of eggs. While we all laughed up our sleeves, she was right. This was 1959 and she was an old lady -- one of many unmarried because so many of their beaux had been killed as young men on the hideous and obscene battlefields of WWI. They had no one to marry, but they became wonderful teachers.
This came back to me today as I read Elizabeth Renzetti's defence of home-ec. Apparently, across Canada home-ec classes are disappearing. What a mistake. Just when we need to teach young mothers how to feed their children from scratch, they dump home-ec. Hello! Ever wonder why we have an obesity epidemic? No one knows how to cook anymore. Everyone is "super-sized", which puts a super-sized strain on our health-care system.
"There's a problem when cooking is fetishized in some quarters and treated as a competitive sport on TV, yet doesn't exist even in its most basic form in many households," wrote Renzetti. A survey by the Dietitians of Canada found that 43 percent of people don't regularly cook for their families. Whaaaaaaaaaat??!!! I learned scratch-cooking from my mother and grandmother, who taught me how to make a meal from.....well......nothing. Potatoes and onions featured prominently in our home because they were cheap and versatile. So did root vegetables. As I have said before, we never ate salad out-of-season. Never. In winter we ate canned fruit for dessert. Frugality and practicality were the watchwords.
I have blogged before about the young mother (of two fat kids) in the checkout line who asked me what "that" was. She was referring to a squash. I told her, told her how to cook it and she went off and bought one, leaving her kids with me to watch until she returned. She actually had a look of victory on her face when she returned with the unknown food.
I delight in cooking with my two-year-old grandson. He makes pancakes, grates cheese, helps with mac-and-cheese and today made a cheese omelet. He loves to cook and help "yamma" in the kitchen. You gotta start early.
No, we don't need to drop home-ec in favour of computer labs. We need home-ec now more than ever.
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Gopod article as usual - however we also need Gym
ReplyDeleteclasses in School. With I-phones, computers the young people soon shall not know how to enjoy libraries,or do regular gym exercises. How pathetic and what a pathetic World we are giving to them!