Thrifty cooking a dying skill
Just before Easter, 34-year home economics veteran Jenny Garrels walked her Grade 11 students through cooking a simple chicken dinner. Unlike past generations of teens she’s taught, Garrels said, this generation just has no idea how to cook at all. Most of them don’t prepare food with their families, she explained. Each step in peeling and boiling potatoes had to be meticulously spelled out. As part of the assignment, the students froze the cleaned chicken bones afterward. But they told her “We’ll never make soup from scratch” in real life.
“Oh yes, you will,” Garrels, who is president of the Teachers of Home Economics Specialist Association, told them, relating the story to the Georgia Straight in a phone interview.
“We have a huge learning curve ahead of us. We’ve become really complacent about our supply of food. We’re not using every scrap anymore,” she said. “Kids don’t have any connection to the food they eat, so they’re open to any kind of sales pitch about food. They have no sense of global economies, or how much it costs to get food to the table. We do try to teach it”¦but if it’s not reinforced at home, it doesn’t sink in.”
Back before second-wave feminism slagged domestic careers, high schools and universities prepared female students to weather economic crises using their kitchens. It was called “thrift”. The New Home Economics Omnibus textbook from 1935, for example, exhorts students to come to terms with whether their income is enough for survival, comfort, or luxury—and create a food budget based on reality, rather than aspirations. Recipes include salad croutons and apple crisp, which cost pennies to make from scratch in the 21st century, but many times that amount if bought from Safeway or Superstore. Similarly, the 1961 textbook Teen Guide to Homemaking points out that packaged foods are more expensive than raw ingredients.
Duh, right?
Except, Garrels said, for the fact that thrift knowledge is in danger of being lost. Without it, she said, B.C.’s younger generations are particularly vulnerable during tough economic times, because they have no idea how to cook for themselves. Home economics cooking classes are no longer mandatory, apart from two weeks of exposure in Grade 8. Despite the discipline’s radical 1980s-era transformation into an agent that connects family life to environmental and social responsibility, Garrels notes that home ec has been sidelined by the provincial government.
“They’re more interested in bringing in a new program than enhancing what’s in the schools,” she said, mentioning Action Schools! B.C. and the Healthy Schools Network, programs created without the career-long expertise of home ec teachers.
Meanwhile, food education for adults has also stepped away from thrift. A cooking spread in the April 2009 issue of Chatelaine includes three recipes for salmon, one featuring beef tenderloin, one strip loin, and one boneless chicken breasts. Compare those choices to the thrift-centric Second World War–era cookbook Victory Meat Extenders, issued by the U.S. National Live Stock and Meat Board. On the menu: creamed brains on toast, liver spoon cakes, braised heart with stuffing, and tongue rolls florentine. Now that’s recessionista cooking.
Modern book editors have created an industry out of resurrecting old homemaking texts as humour material. “While face powder may catch a man, baking powder is the stuff to hold him,” reads How to Be a Good Wife, from 1936, republished with irony by the University of Chicago Press in 2008. And Victory Meat Extenders is featured in journalist James Lileks’s thrift-mocking tome The Gallery of Regrettable Food (Crown, 2001). Lileks’s book also highlights old party recipes that seem stomach-turning by modern standards: what he describes as “erect wieners in a sea of beans” and gelatine salad reminiscent of “a core sample from a mass grave”, or simply “beet pie casserole”.
Yet, these recipes are economical—far cheaper than the fare offered by Chatelaine eight months into a global recession, with Canada’s unemployment rate at eight percent.
According to Garrels, though, 21st-century teens would be hard-pressed to make a meatball if their budget demanded it. Most have no idea how much money their families make, or where it is spent. Nutrition, she noted, is not on the list of reasons why most students make the food choices they do—a fact confirmed by the chips-and-pop lunches she witnesses daily.
Plus, she noted, students’ “taste buds have been fried” by years of eating heavily processed foods. Cooking from scratch, with its financial and nutritional benefits, she said, just isn’t that attractive to most teens.
“Maybe with everyone so busy, parents don’t expect their kids to help cook anymore,” Garrels theorized. “Maybe parents think it’s easier if they just do it themselves. I see people at the grocery store and they are buying food, so someone is cooking it. Subtly, the whole lifestyle has changed in 25 years.”
It would take tough times indeed to call for the return of tongue rolls florentine. But Garrels’s point—that disappearing kitchen skills are leaving a recession generation at the mercy of marketers—should make provincial-curriculum writers quiver like a sea of beans.
Comments
8 Comments
Amy Dash
Apr 24, 2009 at 10:56am
What a refreshing article... I love it! I recently bought two whole chickens for $5.05 kg and cut it up myself instead of paying $17.39 kg for boneless, skinless chicken breast fillets. Teaching children at home how to make a budget stretch is certainly a skill that has been lost by some. Thanks again for a great article!
Denise
Apr 25, 2009 at 2:25am
Reading this article from Australia, and wholeheartedly agree with it. Congrats to you Home Economics teachers for helping the next generation to recognise that the skills of old are not always out of date.
Gale Smith
Apr 25, 2009 at 7:53pm
Thank you for interviewing a home economics teacher. Our courses are still very important in schools, even thought they continue to be relegated to elective status. With all the concern for health, the rise in Type 2 Diabetes and obesity, we increasingly see in calls for nutrition education but knowing the food guide and nutrients will never accomplish the same results as hands on practical experiences such as the examples that Garrels mentions. Perhaps it will be the economic crisis that brings back common sense food preparation and courses that honour the importance of education for every day life.
Eliza Olson
Apr 27, 2009 at 12:32pm
I used to be a Home Ec. teacher and I left teaching Home Ec. because of the negative attitude towards it. I got a program created by a Gym teacher in the USA that covered everything from birth to death and marriage and divorce. You wouldn't believe the resistance some parents to their children carrying around an egg for a week as a symbolic child.
Those that got into the program, planning a wedding, dealing with parenting got a great dose of reality.
Anthony H
Apr 29, 2009 at 12:02pm
A great article and as many have suggested, timely. I know that when I was taking Home EC, twenty years ago, many things were lacking; but the important things were there; also, having had parents who grew up in the Great Depression, they instilled in me a sense of thrift (though I have only re-acquainted myself with it in the past 2 years or so).
murray
Apr 29, 2009 at 4:33pm
So it's feminism's fault that people can't cook? Really? I mean, it wouldn't have anything to do with the way the big food corps aggressively market prepared and processed foods or anything, I guess.
I, like another commenter, learned to cook from my mother, who grew up in the Great Depression and said everyone -- male and female -- should know how to cook as a "survival skill."
L. Redmond
May 1, 2009 at 12:08am
Wonderful article! Reality is refreshing.
In my high-school up north, in the late 60s - early 70s, cooking, sewing, childcare and typing was mandatory for girls, and 1 semester of cooking was recommended for boys, (but they could avoid it if parents resisted). In grade 8 the boys learned to cook eggs, steak, roasts, and baked potatoes. Girls cooked anything you could make with flour, sugar, oil, water... We made blanc mange, pancakes, and decorated cakes, and drank black tea from aluminum tea pots. Next year we took a lot of notes on food safety, protein, carbohydrates and the Canada food guide. We baked and sold cookies at lunch half the year so we could buy the ingredients to cook 1 complete meal for our last class. Which we worked on as a group and were graded on.
About 1/3 of the girls already cooked at home, the rest of us had been peeling the potatoes for dinner and washing dishes.
Cleaning was a major focus. Most of us still had stay at home mothers. If wives worked outside the home it was considered that the husband wasn't a good provider for the family.
Kids had chores they were responsible for, but only after the homework was completed. Most families had at least a small vegetable garden. We were taught how to tend the garden, and feed the chickens. Remember fresh raw peas, strawberries? Our mothers did canning and freezing for winter, all the cooking, hanging out the laundry winter and summer, most of the cleaning, and 99% of the child rearing. Kids were expected to stay out of the way. There was a lot to do always.
Packaged and prepared foods were rare and a treat, as was eating in a restaurant (partly because mom didn't have to prepare it). It meant that dad had brought home a better paycheck that week. A sign of wealth! I wonder what percentage of families can afford 3 kids, 1/2 acre lots and a continuous stay at home wife now a days?
I basically had to teach myself to cook following school notebooks when I ended up with my own family. We ate my errors because we had to, but thanks to those notes I didn't poison them! Now my best meals are learned from friends, by watching and doing!
No doubt most young people are being totally ripped off, because they don't have the background to understand SO MUCH deceptive and misleading packing and advertising!
Thank heaven some meat packages now have safe handling instructions printed on them. What used to be common knowledge is now being treated as NEW technology.
COMMON KNOWLEDGE used to be TAUGHT.
Katy
Nov 18, 2010 at 11:52pm
While I agree with this article, I have to say that when I was a teen, the farthest thing from my mind was cooking... and cooking from scratch at that! But now, at the age of 30, I cook often, and from scratch. I taught myself; finding recipes online and sharing with friends. Almost none of my cooking skills come from my Mom.
I really don't think a teens lack of interest or knowledge in cooking is an indicator of what they will be like when they're older.