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.
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.
each week when we had cooking class it was a nightmare for me. i always jad to explain myself again and again to everyone. why I don’t eat meat. what my ethics and morals are. ever fucking week. and in the end they have me bad grades even after cooking their bs recipes. i just didn’t eat them. because obvious reasons. fuck this mandatory courses.
It sounds like the actual problem was teachers / curriculum.
Here’s the fun question though. If they had vegetarian options to choose from and people weren’t dicks about you being vegetarian what would your opinion be?
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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.
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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.
Obviously you shouldn’t force anyone to eat what they can’t eat.
Which sounds nice until you realize the reality of all schools actually work, and how a lot of teachers actually think.
“Well the state says we have to do this in the state says you have to eat it, so you have to eat it ”
“But teacher that’s not what the law actually says “
“Don’t talk back to me you have detention “
Right. And you’ll have that one teacher who thinks being vegetarian is “just a phase” or some other crap like that, and forcefully override the student’s beliefs. You can have the best intentions in a system like what OP is prescribing, and then there’s that one teacher who takes it way too far.
So you’re saying there might be a bad teacher out there, so you can’t do anything ever. Yeah no that’s not a real argument.