Unpopular Opinion

A massive contributor to obesity is the cost of healthy food versus non healthy food.

There is a reason they intentionally do not teach basic life skills in school. Just like they do not teach you about money, taxes and finance.

I took home economics, learned about cooking and sewing. 10/10, would recommend.

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.

Cooking class was mandatory in my school in the 90s. We learned how to make muffins from scratch, some basic (and I mean very basic) meals, and some basic home cleaning. It was better than nothing, but I was able to see who had never been shown any of it before. I had grew up cooking for myself, and I was expected to help with dishes. So none of it was that new to me. But some of the kids had never touched unprepared food before. Some had never washed a dish before. It was obvious which ones were going to grow up still not knowing how to cook for themselves beyond microwave meals and takeout.

A single course isn't going to do much to help guide a kid into being a healthy adult. Basic life skills should be a graduated course in every single year of grade school. It's the only way to engrain it into everyday life.

If you make it mandatory, you have to accommodate every student's dietary requirements.

here in germany it was mandatory and they did force me to cook and eat things i didn't eat. I'm vegetarian but they tried to force me to eat and cook it. i also don't eat specific other things because i hate their taste and they forced me to eat this bs.

fuck this "mandatory" courses. it's not helping to live healthy. it's forcing children to do stuff they don't want to do and gives them bad grades for it. i got bad grades just because i was vegetarian and didn't eat meat. fuck this.

That sounds nice but misses the point of the problem. See the posts about food costs in this thread for one. Another issue is that schools here are woefully underfunded. When you can barely fix the roof, mitigate mold, buy textbooks for core classes, afford to let teachers use the copy machines or have enough basic office supplies, etc, etc, etc, cooking classes and their facilities/materials costs are kind of a (possibly lead) pipe dream. But lets face it, if schools did get funded to the level they deserved too many parents would simply make sure that money got redirected towards the school's football team.

They are, all kids do Food Technology in Secondary School in the UK, where we learn to cook various things.

I agree that they should also be mandatory in other countries, cooking is one of those things everyone needs to learn, and if their parents are too lazy to teach them, schools must step in.

Is this an unpopular opinion? Life skills classes are a great idea, my current high schooler took Culinary (geared more towards commercial kitchens but still cooking) and is taking financial literacy this year.

If physical education is mandatory, I agree that nutrition & cooking class, as well as budgeting/financial class, are part of a comprehensive education. I think they should bring back sex ed too.

Being able to cook well is more a function of experience, all my kids can cook now, because they like to eat and it's the easiest and most affordable way to get good meals. But the one who took the class does show more interest at a younger age.