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 put cooking as more important than Shakespeare and calculus. Cooking is done everyday and directly impacts your health. It really is an essential life skill more than pretty much anything else.
You can say don’t force people about everything in school. That’s the whole point of school, to force people to learn what they need to know so they have basic skills and knowledge. Plenty of people would be illiterate if we didn’t force them to learn to read. We force people to learn to read because you need it.
One point though I wouldn’t have grades on cooking.
learning something and being forced to eat and cook things are 2 things. teach the informations and knowledge self, that’s fine. but don’t force the cooking and eating.
also just because it’s mandatory it don’t means it helps. i had it mandatory and still don’t eat more healthy. also they didn’t teached us really much. they printed out recipes, gave them to us and said “go”. i don’t need need a cooking course for that. teachers often themself can’t cook so expecting them to teach it is “ehhhh”.
in my opinion it’s the job of parents to teach their kids cooking. not schools. parents cook daily anyway so they can teach their children at this times things.
Yes force to cook, that’s whole point, To teach how to cook.
To eat? Well if you can’t eat your own cooking that’s your own pass or fail. (Obviously you shouldn’t force vegetarians to eat meat or muslims to eat pork.)
People can’t even start if they don’t know how to cook.
You can say that about any subject. That’s the point of having schools and mandatory learning, to teach the essentials that are not negotiable. And what I’m saying in this post is that we should have cooking as mandatory as any other subject in school because it’s an essential life skill. Not negotiable, not outsourced to parents, you get it in school.