The article is a little different to what is usually written on Three Little Buhos so let me know whether its something you'd like to read more :) Anyway, over to Catherine.
Annie x
Eat To Live Or Live To
Eat?
According to some recent research, nearly 60% of 18–25-year-olds
leave home without being able to cook five simple dishes: a statistic that
realistically isn’t all that surprising.
Much is made these days of the inability of our youth to
demonstrate many fundamental home-style skills. It’s almost as though we expect
them to be fully accomplished keepers of house and home in the manner of adults
with much tried and tested experience. It’s not the lack of skills behind the
outcry that is objectionable, but rather the sentiment.
However, proficiency in this skill-set is important and it
is desirable for both parents and schools to help instil it. Whether cookery
classes should constitute part of the school curriculum is, after all, a
much-debated point. This cause is championed in some political fields as being
a solution to obesity in adulthood – a theory that has had many a celebrity
chef clogging up the airwaves as they proclaim that we’re all condemned to a
life of convenience food and cholesterol.
Whether the problem is that our children don’t know the
difference between a crisp and a carrot is debateable. Perhaps they just prefer
the taste of one to the other.
While being a little bit useless on the home economics front
isn’t something to be applauded particularly, let’s face it – the ability to
accomplish a repertoire of five dishes is not the be-all and end-all. It
certainly isn’t the end of the world if that particular box isn’t ticked by the
age of 25.
There’s every chance that these accomplishments will come easily
at a later date. A burgeoning desire to cook is almost a rite of passage for
the 30-something after all. While your late teens and early 20s are all about
working hard and playing hard, your 30s seem to be the time to embrace
homemaking. After all, priorities change as we get older and, however unwisely,
chances are that when we’re in our 20s our priorities do not include sourcing
and producing healthy, balanced meals.
Most teenagers are bundled off to university, disdainfully
agreeing to take the ubiquitous box of mother’s cast-off Tefal
cookware, while doubting that they’ll actually use it much.
For many this is the ‘sink or swim’ moment and not all
youngsters finish their education with fewer home skills than they started with.
In fact, those desperate to shake off the reputation that young people don’t
cook could even surprise you by returning with more cooking ideas under their
belts than you have – just don’t be surprised if some of them involve pot
noodles!
