Fast Food Baby

[slightlyunbalanced]

AIBU to be having severe palpitations?!

Train wreck TV.

Super fayre for a wet midweek night :)

Ive not met a teenager or young adult that sits at home watching cookery programmes. They live the fast life on takeaways nowadays most only eat home cooked meals at their parents house, the nearest they come to cooking is picking up their dinner on a plate next to the cooker they have no idea how it got from the cooker to the plate.

My Son is an excellent cook and so is my Daughter, and they love cookery programs.

If you can read a frigging pizza leaflet, you can read a recipe. It is not rocket science

Don't worry Lewis, I wish I had a TV. (not sure how to take your big grin though, you making fun of my lack of TV?

I have to disagree with you snippy, I am only 23 and most my friends can cook, and that includes men and women. You don't need to watch cooking shows to learn how to cook, but some of them are known to have checked on youtube on how, for example, make omelettes etc.

Making a boiled egg or beans on toast or some frozen veg is easy and if you wanted to do it, if you prioritised it, you could do it, just like you could learn more complex things. Also, you don't need to cook to offer your kid apples, bananas, pears (which he ASKED for) and even raw salad veg. There's no excuse imo for that. I missed most of cuba's story.

I felt for michael's mum and dad tbh, they were just worried about him and I've been down the 'well at least he's eaten something' route and it temporarily eases the physical pain of anxiety you feel when your kid won't eat. They needed to turn it around though - thought the experiment with the iron tonic etc was very very good.

Making a boiled egg or beans on toast or some frozen veg is easy and if you wanted to do it, if you prioritised it, you could do it, just like you could learn more complex things. Also, you don't need to cook to offer your kid apples, bananas, pears (which he ASKED for) and even raw salad veg. There's no excuse imo for that. I missed most of cuba's story.

I felt for michael's mum and dad tbh, they were just worried about him and I've been down the 'well at least he's eaten something' route and it temporarily eases the physical pain of anxiety you feel when your kid won't eat. They needed to turn it around though - thought the experiment with the iron tonic etc was very very good.

LewisFan YABVU!

I'd love to sit all of those parents down and tell them exactly what diabetes does to your body, and that their kids can look forward to having it.

Michael's mum and dad were misguided but I think their hearts were in the right place. Taking chocolate fingers to a fruit and veg lunch at nursery then wondering why he wouldn't eat the fruit and veg was a bit thick though.

Cuba's mum was semi arsed, dad wasn't arsed at all.

Harley's mum.. oh my god. How can she afford it?!

Also agree that was a shocking generalisation Snippy. I'm 25 and consider myself a young parent. I was 23 having my ds and I have always cooked from scratch for him.

I didn't study Home Ec as have always been more academic (at my school your subject choices were based around your interests and abilities with anything more than a very basic overview of Child Development, Home Economics e.t.c. not generally offered to those above a certain level of study) and can't say my mother was a whiz in the kitchen - cooking is just something I enjoyed and learned to do in order to take care of myself at uni and later, my family.

I really don't believe (or want to) that this programme is an accurate reflection of the eating habits of every young person or family. Certainly nobody I know eats like this on a regular basis. It has been made to garner our hysteria. Not pleasant viewing though, hope the families are getting the ongoing help and support they need.

i was 18 when i had ds, we only did home ec for 3 years, and hardly ever actually made anything. why are the schools to blame? my step mum taught me to cook, she cooked everything from scratch and when i moved out i did 2, everyones quick to blame schools for not teaching cookery,sex education,road safety,cycling proficiency when its not actually their job is it? school is to teach academics so unless parents are going to start teaching algebra and french etc and the schools take over what the parents should be teaching their children then its still the parents job!

Agree that if you can read you can cook. My two Grans taught me the basics and then I taught myself via trial and error. I did Home Ec at school 20 plus years ago and it was crap then too.

I had my first child at 22 and I can safely say he has never had a Kebab.

Im a food tech teacher.
It is not compulsary in schools- but most (not all) schools offer it. It was going to be compulsary from sept 2011 but the new government scrapped that.
I dont think its down to not having it in schools though- some people just cant be arsed- you could give them all the help in the world and they still couldnt be bothered. If they wanted to, they could learn how to boil some pasta or cook an egg- comes down to motivation in the end!

It's a sign of how we treat cooking in the UK that english schools call home economics 'Food technology'.

I disagree- Home economics was full of crap like decorating a table and folding napkins.
Food tech is all about the food.

Home economics at my school (left in '97) was a joke. Poor mans pizza anyone? The standard doesn't seem to have improved much in the last 15 years either as the most complicated thing DS1 has made at senior school so far is fruit salad. Chop a bit of apple up, pour orange juice over it and call it 'cooking'

That is sod all excuse though, parents should be teaching their kids life skills and the kids should be finding out how to cook for their own benefit. My dad had a repertoire of 3 dishes that he could reliably cook, my mum relied on packet mixes and jars of sauce so the cooking aspect was minimal, yet I learnt to cook pretty well because I was interested. Also in self defence, dad used to pass off burnt bits as being 'Cajun style'

You only need a basic level of literacy to throw together a decent meal using a jar of Uncle Ben's finest. You don't need to be Delia to teach your kids to cook, just let them experiment a bit in the kitchen. My parents never taught me to cook, mostly because they didn't really know how to make meals from scratch themselves but they encouraged me to have a bash at it myself and gamely forced down the abominations I produced in the early days with a grimace passed off as a smile.

Home ec has never involved napkin folding in scotland. Ever. It's just about food preparation, basic hygiene and cooking.

I don't see the link between technology and cooking.

Huge generalisation to say that youn adults don't cook. I'm 23 and cook every day. I can do everything from souffles to meringues to curries. And my friends - though I accep they represent a certain demographic that hasn't grown up on fast food - all cook too.

As for food technology, I did it for GCSE and it was a mix of science-based bits and pieces ('oh look, the proteins are breaking down!' etc) and proper cooking.

Poor kids in that program. It does make me sad, particularly Cuba, but that is genuinely how some people eat and feed their children. If parents have 'learned' that it's too difficult to cook, they won't bother. What worries me is that they don't see their children as a reason to bother.

Design and Technology - choosing the correct processes and equipment to get a good end result
i.e. at KS3 it will be showing the pupils the correct processes to use-e.g. you cant boil an egg on a BBQ, them learning basic skills etc- by KS4 it should be them choosing the correct way to do things.
Once pupils understand why and how things react the way they do then it is easier to make decisions

Food tech/home economics in my dses high school seems to involve a lot of written work - looking at nutrition (which is good) but also doing stuff which contributes nothing to a child's ability to cook, like designing adverts or packaging. Plus the school provide the ingredients on a budget of next-to-nothing, so end up buying really cheap, crap ingredients so the end product tastes foul and does nothing to show the kids that cooking food from scratch makes delicious meals.

I had my son at 20 and he has never had a takeaway either other than the occasional fish and chips or mcdonald's happy meal, and he's nearly 3. Pretty offended actually to hear that young parents don't bother feeding their kids properly because they don't know how to

Where my son goes to school they have to choose between art, woodwork, food tech or child development . Ds can't draw has no interest in woodwork or children but has always enjoyed cooking.

They made a variety of things over the two years ( cost a bloody fortune in ingredients each week)

I think sometimes it's just down to parents laziness, after all there is no cooking envolved in handing out fruit and it doesn't take much to boil some veg

I'm sure the processes of cookign have been moulded to fit into technology objectives, I just don't think that's a good way forward. There's a move away from using cooking methods in your own kitchen and a move towards designing packaging and researching long-life products and linking in with supermarket processes and making a profit from designing and selling (shit) food.

I reckon what Heston does is more Food Tech than home ec. Food Tech sounds a bit more exciting than Home Economics, anyway.

I recall (and I'm not that old) Home Ec text books giving detailed instructions as to what your routine should be in the morning (getting your husband's breakfast and whatnot). Although we didn't actually use those bits of the book in the 1980s, thankfully

I watched Fast Food Babies last night and all the families had made great strides.

Yes, the multi million pound food industry, regulations, glossing over the shitness of the food.