We’re in an obesity epidemic and most people don’t know how to cook even very basic meals.
Make space for it, squish other classes if you need. Make it mandatory, everyone has to take it. Maybe even ongoing through multiple grades.
Edit: Rice, beans, and even basic meats are cheap. To eat healthy you don’t need your meal to be 100% Bell peppers and tomatoes.
I’ll even say it’s worth paying more …… instead of a textbook, every kid should have a subscription to one of those meal kit services. Yeah, they’re expensive, but worked really well for teaching my kids a lot about cooking.
Every week, they chose among a dozen or so choices, instead of being overwhelmed with infinite choice or stuck in a rut of what you know. Every week, they know to expect to make a meal. Every week, they have all the ingredients together in one place. Every week, they have a well-written recipe card organized for efficient preparation and with little assumption of experience. Every week, the6 learned something about prep or a cooking strategy or an ingredient or a cuisine. It worked great for my kids and I wish they were affordable for all kids
A massive contributor to obesity is the cost of healthy food versus non healthy food.
I agree. The cost of pre-made foods with a bunch of chemicals is way cheaper than fresh.
I can go to my local store and pay $40(USD) for some steak versus $4(USD) for a box of hamburger helper and $6(USD) for a pound of hamburger or even $6(USD) for a bag of fresh carrots versus 50 cents for a can of carrots, with preservatives.
Another thing too is the fact that pre-made foods are quicker to cook than fresh foods. Once again the hamburger helper contrast. It takes about 15 minutes to make the “meal” versus 45 minutes to an hour to cook the same dish from scratch with fresh food.
Rice, beans, and even basic meats are cheap.
Processed meat, yeah. Which is full of shit.
I can go and get a bag of chips and two packs of pies/pasties/cheap steak for maybe £6.
Doing it properly with fresh veg will cost a minimum of of 3/4 times as much.
Ground beef is cheap. Actual processed meat like sausages, deli meat, bacon, is expensive.
While I agree that everyone should have at least some understanding of cooking, the problem of obesity isn’t directly related to knowing how to cook. It has far more to do with the accessibility of certain types of food in a given community. The horribly unhealthy food is often a fraction of the cost of fresh, healthy food. It’s not necessarily the case that don’t know/want to cook their own healthy meals, it’s that they literally can’t afford to do so.
Maybe, but the argument is the rice and beans example. If people aren’t familiar with turning rice and beans into a meal, and don’t have the experience to do it efficiently, they’re more likely to opt for convenience over cost and nutrition
It’s impossible to even start if you don’t know how to cook.
True, but it’s impossible to do no matter what you know if it’s unaffordable
C’mon rice and and beans and basic meat is cheap.
It’s typically only the heavily processed versions of beans and meats that are cheap. Besides, those items hardly make for a healthy diet by themselves. It’s all the other ingredients required that drive the costs up.
Also, your suggestion of simply pushing for cooking classes regardless of the cost, would ironically make the problem worse. The burden of that cost will inevitably land on poorer people. And at the same time potentially removing access to other valuable classes and skills. They will be paying for an education that they still can’t afford to utilize.
The cheapest meats I see are the unprocessed ones: Ground beef. Whole chickens. Whole turkeys. Liver. Those giant pork loins.
The expensive meats are the cut up chickens, the chickens ready to cook sealed in whatever flavour, the bacon, the spam, the sausage. The deli meat are multiples more expensive.
Dried beans are cheap.
Rice is cheap.
That’s the vast majority of my calories.
I don’t know how your taxes work, but the poorer people pay less in absolute terms and percentage terms. Marginal tax rates go up as you earn more. Yes the capital gains tax is low and makes the percentages look odd.
The cost of food is obviously going to vary depending on location, but it’s pretty well proven that healthier, more nutritional foods tend to be more expensive than the less healthy, mass manufactured alternative. Ground beef, rice, and beans alone do NOT make for a healthy and balanced diet, even if they are cheap. Next time you’re shopping, compare the price and ingredients of fresh vegetables vs canned or frozen. Compare the breads, dairy products, grains and cereals, snacks, condiments, etc. You’ll almost certainly find that the more affordable options are loaded with far more preservatives, additives and various sugars.
While a cooking class may help a person make better choices with their diet, it will not change the fact that a large portion of the population literally can’t afford to eat healthier.
It’s true that poor people pay less in taxes, but the taxes will always have a much greater impact on their lives compared to someone with higher income and therefore more available money. If someone makes $1000/month and pays 20% tax, they only have $800 left. Compared to someone that makes $10000/month and pays 30% tax, they still have $7000 left over. Assuming they both live in the same area and pay the same bills, which one is affected by a tax increase more? Which one is going to be able to afford the more expensive, but healthier foods?
JFC obviously you need more than rice, beans, and ground beef. But things like this make up the bulk of your calories. Not all, the bulk.
Frozen vegetables are fine, in fact they study it and it’s even better nutritionally because the vitamins are frozen and don’t start to break down. Canned vegetables are probably fine too, not sure if they add sugar or salt.
This is the problem, people think you need fresh everything everyday and that broccoli needs to bulk of your calories or something like that, and you don’t. The bulk (not all, the bulk) of your calories can come from very basic foods. You can eat healthy if you know some basic cooking.
You keep discounting things like rice, beans, all the meats I listed, and now you discount frozen vegetables, canned vegetables. You discount all the stuff that is cheap and healthy. These are the basic foods that you need to learn how to cook. This is the problem, you think everything needs to be fresh everyday and you can’t get the bulk (not all, the bulk) from basic foods.
Ok taxes, I doubt tax increases will ever go to the poor. Nor do I think this would be that expensive to teach cooking. When you look at how much we spend on schools and teachers, adding some hot plates and ovens is minuscule. You replace hours in one class with another, no change in teachers.
On to how this will save money, do you know how many problems come from obesity? And diabetes? How many other issues? Look at the health care costs, it’s outrageous. Some basic cooking skills will go a long way to prevent a lot of this, saving money for both people and government. Just need a tiny little bit at the start and it’ll save money for everyone.
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If you make it mandatory, you have to accommodate every student’s dietary requirements.
I took home economics, learned about cooking and sewing. 10/10, would recommend.
Cut the sewing. We don’t have a clothing shortage, we have an obesity epidemic.
We also have a epidemic of just throwing shit in a landfill and getting a new one.
I could give a shit if someone wants to eat chicken nuggies for every meal. I care more about landfills piling up trash that could have just been repaired or reused.
We have what 70% of the US population overweight or obese. That’s the problem of our times.
Not to mention that fast fashion means we go through clothes before they are worn out, the gain is on wearing them until they worn out. When it’s threadbare sewing will not help. Teaching sewing is not a good use of time, make the best use of the resources we have.
You do realize that teaching people to cook does absolutely nothing to keep people from being obese, right? I cook all the time, still over weight. Cooking fresh food does not equate to a healthy diet and being thin. People’s over eating, and diets don’t really affect you.
Plus, you can’t force shit like this on people, they have to want to do it. I could eat healthier, sure, but I’d truly rather die a few years younger than to have wasted my life eating beans, rice and basic meats like you are suggesting.
We also have widening income inequality, and learning how to mend clothes is a great way to save money. Same with cooking.
