To find food tech irrationally irritating?

[JustBeingJobless]

Ds is yr 7 and has just started food tech. I’m now in possession of a shopping list for ingredients for this week, which will cost me over a fiver, and will create a meal that he won’t even entertain due to containing onions which he can’t stand! Not to mention the raw ingredients festering in the bottom of his school bag all day before they even get to the lesson. Grrr..... just seems like a total waste of money, and, as they’re using a bloody jar of Dolmio (a small jar, which I know they don’t sell at Aldi, so means a special trip to the co-op), not really teaching them how to make a sauce anyway. I know it’s a “life skill”, but I begrudge paying an extra £5 on my shopping bill every week (only normally spend £50ish for an entire week as on a tight budget) when the chances are it’ll end up in the bin anyway!

Tupperware. Not Tupperward.

My dd cooks every other week and we adapt the recipe to something she will eat - she made an astonishingly good quiche last week, including the pastry.
They also cover hygiene and nutrition, which I think is pretty useful.
I’m not saying it’s her favourite subject or anything and she won’t be doing a GCSE but she doesn’t mind it and has made some quite nice things
It’s risotto this next week but as she doesn’t like mushrooms or Parmesan she will adapt it to a sort of veggie paella type dish. Her teacher doesn’t mind if the basic method being taught is the same

I don't like buying the ingredients. But I haven't been asked to buy a jar of dolmio!!
Ours are all basic natural ingredients to make pasta, scones, bread, samosa's etc.

Food tech rooms are pretty rank. Kids never have the time to clean and dry anything properly.

The amount of kids that come to a food tech lesson and have never washed up at home is shocking. So glad I don't do that anymore.

As a teacher we had to buy ingredients ourselves and were expected to take the product home to eat....so the money didn't come out the budget. I never ate anything from that classroom. It was so old and minging. Wooden rotton units and always smelt like sour milk

I sort of get bread.

But who is going to have the urge to make their own butter?

My year 7 just seems to make different variations of bread like her brother did two years ago. Sausage rolls were hot dogs wrapped in bread mix, we've had garlic bread, pinwheel pizzas, sweet pin wheels all same bread mix. Oh a pasta mayo and underbaked scones.

I've mentioned this one a few times on various threads, I've been a youth volunteer with various organisations and one thing that really sticks in my mind was the almost 15 year old who not only had never peeled a potato (and was scared to) but had never seen one!

My daughters School just ask for £3 each time they cook which is every other week and they supply the ingredients. I’ve only ever once seen what she made as either it was nice and she ate at school or horrible and she binned it (they don’t get a big portion)

My dd does food tech. It started with me providing ingredients, then moved on to me sending £2 for each lesson and the teacher got the ingredients. I dont seem to be asked for anything these days so i dont really know how it's paid for 🤔 Today they were given surprise ingredients and they had to make something with them. She has learned how to portion a chicken, fillet fish, make different pastries from scratch, different kinds of pasta from scratch, lots of different sauces etc. They've learned loads now I come to think of it. They have to prepare a dish for their exams which needs to demonstrate a degree of technical ability so I don't think a jar of dolmio will cut it.

I’d love to just send him in every week with a couple of quid! Much easier than having to buy a huge bag of something that will end up festering in the back of the cupboard.

I did home ec in the late 70's early 80's. First thing we made was an angel delight with tinned fruit in the bottom of the bowl. I remember copying pages and pages from a text book from the 40's/50's including advice not to mix milk from different days etc. (this was referring to milk delivered by local farmers pre pasteurisation ffs).

It wasn't all bad, later on we made different types of pastry, a pizza base that didn't need yeast, cakes, casseroles, hotpots and lots of other meals. We were also taught about different cuts of meat, seasonal fruit and veg, food hygiene, nutrition and the importance of a balanced diet.

Teacher teaches 21 lessons a week and people are saying he/she should bulk buy the ingredients? Get a grip!

DS quote enjoys Food Tech. The school have a large classroom with a modern kitchen in, donated by a local kitchen company run by a parent and they get in all the ingredients donated by a local but large supermarket. Maybe this is an option for school?
So far he has made bread, a soffritto sauce which is a base for so many things, vegetable soup, chicken tikka and a curry. He wanted to do Food Tech GCSE but has no interest in the industry, and there are other options he would like to do too, so we plan to learn to make things he likes at home instead.
Back in the 90s we cooked scotch eggs, pineapple upside down cake and apple crumble. Randomly scotch egg making was great fun and I still sometimes make them when I’m in the mood.

I have made butter. It's only worthwhile if you have a cow, as making it from cream is quite expensive compared with bought butter.
It would be better if they learned about nutrition, budgeting, and cleaning techniques.

Our secondary school just charges an amount at the start of the year. It's easier but in a way I would rather buy my own as I bet they buy cheap meat and eggs.

This year our son has rarely remembered to go and pick up what he has made at the end of the day so I don't see much of it anyway. He does sometimes remember if it's something he likes though.

Forgot to say, I think our son has learnt to cook enough that he could survive living on his own so it's served its purpose. They also do regular lessons on food safety and nutrition as part of Food Tech lessons.

It seems like maybe a better way to do things would be to ask parents for a contribution at the start of the year and bulk buy ingredients for the kids to cook with.

This is what my school did 30 years ago. It also meant the ingredients were kept in a fridge rather than in school bags and lockers until required. Much cheaper and more sensible.

A jar of dolmio? That's awful. Mind you when I was at school we learned to "make pizza" - ready made pizza base, tube of tomato purée for the sauce and a bit of cheese.
I remember telling the teacher that Italians would cry if they knew we were using straight tomato purée as the tomato sauce.
I was brought up very into cooking healthily but in a hippy lentil-y type way and remember failing a big piece of work because I said that issuing low fat "spread" was not a healthy adaptation compared to butter. I'm sure I was a total dickhead and a nightmare child to teach but she was utterly clueless about food and nutrition.
Such a shame!

90s/00s for me. It was a load of tosh and I never learned anything useful. The ingredients were expensive and the food I made was invariably disgusting, not that that had any effect on my marks since the teacher never took more than a cursory glance at the finished dish, let alone tasted it. The buns went mouldy, the pizza was undercooked, and the chocolate cakes got nicked.

I've learnt to cook from my mum, my late gran, and my own experimenting. (And then I learnt that after a days' work I'd really rather just shove ready meals in the oven.)

Like a PP mentioned, they tried to spin it - and all the other DT classes - into the conceit that we were designing things for commercial production. Nothing I ever made would have been remotely appropriate for such, and it meant that useful practical skills were neglected. For example the GCSE Food Tech project (I had quit the subject by then) was to make a ready meal. What good is that to anyone?! The whole point of a ready meal is that you don't have to make it. It didn't teach us anything worthwhile about business either; I don't remember ever being asked to figure out production costs, margins, likely sales, etc. for our fictional products.

Surely in good tech they should be learning the Chorley wood process rather than making bread from scratch.

Also in what sane world would you buy a jarred sauce but make butter from cream?!?!?

As a working food tech I can make a million jars of sauce quite happily, but have no idea how to make a roux. That's not what we need for our children.

We had to bring in read made stuff and basically assemble it too, like a pizza Base/tomato puree/grated cheese/toppings

My mum used to teach me to actually make the things we had to bring in, and I would take in the one I had made at home and assemble it in school

So we had to take ready rolled puff pastry and a filling of choice in to school, so mum made puff pastry with me and we rolled it out, and we made a vegetarian mince/onion/gravy type filling to go in it then I put them together to make a pasty in school.

There were a few tins of all day breakfast brought in for other people's filling