In her latest post, Small Hands makes reference to her mother's vociferous objection to her taking cooking classes in high school. Apparently, the thought was that time spent cooking was not time spent on college preparation or some other kind of worthy subject. In my house, the situation was a little different. For years my mom called me the "Home Ec Poster Child" because, no matter how elementary the cooking project, I was doomed to failure. She really, really encouraged me to take ninth grade cooking on the grounds that maybe I'd learn something and wouldn't be destroying her kitchen in the process.


In my school, special emphasis was given to the kinds of foods that latchkey kids could make on their own with minimal fuss: English muffin pizzas, pies made with instant pudding, tuna casserole that kind of thing. I guess I did o.k., since there are no disasters that stand out was being particularly fantastic. I burned a few things and never quite got the hang of making little flowers out of carrot slices, but other than that it was a pretty benign experience. I did fail the Jell-o quiz, but to this day believe that the last question was a trick. My mom was a little disappointed, remembering her high school cooking instruction as full of roasts and omelets and more complicated dishes leading to full meals catered for sports banquets.


Not until college did I catch the cooking bug. My school did not have meal service on weekends (a reflection of its past as primarily a commuter school) so we were on our own with local pizza places or the dorm kitchens. Sometime during freshman year I got it in my head to make a stir fry. I'd never made one before and probably had no idea what I was doing but I forged ahead and I remember it as being great. And that was the beginning. Now (pregnancy yucks aside) I consider myself fairly accomplished in the kitchen and generally pretty fearless.


I'm not sure that high school cooking classes really helped me, but I'm confident that they didn't hurt. I still managed three AP classes, Japanese and accelerated sciences. And just last night we had tuna casserole for dinner. On the whole, it was probably a good idea for me to have taken them given that they didn't interfere with anything else and gave me at least one dish that has lived on well past the time I learned how to make it. I understand that these days cooking is more or less extinct as a high school offering and I'm not sure if this is good or bad. Sure, we should make sure that kids can read and write and learn to settle a disput without weapons but with obesity an increasingly intractable problem, should kids (boys and girls) maybe also learn how to feed themselves without resorting to super-sizing? I imagine that even an English muffin pizza (with a fresh veggie topping, say) is a far sight better than most fast food sandwiches, but how many teens would even think to make one? Shame, really.