When I was a lad in school, Domestic Science was a compulsory subject we had to take, but, this has long since been abolished. In domestic science, youngsters would be taught how to cook numerous healthy nutritious meals on a budget. We were taught how to bake bread, how to cook offal, and how to feed a family using proper raw ingredients.
A key aspect was budgeting and costing the meals, including how to pad out meals and how to reduce food waste. The abolishment of domestic science in schools has, in my view, had an adverse knock on effect on a national level. We are seeing more and more people in the UK, and across the world going to food banks - why? Because these people who rely on the foodbanks have become addicted to processed convenience food, they do not know how to prepare food from scratch. Lets look at a simple example - our daily bread. One loaf here in the UK costs between £0.45 and £1.00, yet 1kg of flour costs £0.45 and can make 6 loaves of bread. Surely, if people are so desperate for food, a bag of flour would be far better to donate to a food bank than one loaf of bread. However, we have to dumb down our thinking to the lowest common denominator - what if people lack the knowledge to bake their own bread? Hmmm, well, libraries are free to all, and they could easily borrow a book full of bread recipes, couldn’t they? One would like to think so, but it is far easier for these people to go to a food bank and collect their processed ready meals then to put the effort in to learn how to cook. Cooking cheap and nutritious meals is easy - I am sure that those on Jobseekers and disability allowance could learn a few skills - after all, they are not holding down jobs and have plenty of time on their hands. Food banks have taken away the need for people to look after themselves!
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