Is obesity linked to class?

I enjoyed those domestic science classes where we made all sorts of stuff. I've used the basic roux for 50 odd years and every time I talk my way through it, just like the teacher!

when you reminded me of my DS lessons. We also learnt how to wash a hairbrush!

I still like to see a nicely laid table with shiny cutlery and glasses so long as I don't have to do too much towards it.

tiggy you brought back all the memories of my twice a week domestic science lessons, in which we learned how to lay a table, launder and starch a linen tablecloth, wash glasses, cutlery, dishes and pans, even polish silver, in one section of our lessons, and we would plan and cook meals in the other. I learned puff, rough puff, choux, hot waiter and shortcrust pastry, and loads of savoury meals and desserts, as well as the usual scones, rock buns and raspberry buns. Domestic science lessons continued into the fifth year, so we could all cook, albeit a lot of it was English, traditional meals - no pasta, curries or paellas.

My grandson told me learned to make chicken nuggets when he was 11. Great, I said - you'll be able to make them again. But no - they just did the ingredients and method and wrote it down. We set to when he visited, using his recipe, and made breadcrumbs, set out the flour and egg, and he wielded my sharpest knife to cut the chicken, whilst we talked about hygiene with meat. Then, when they were cooked he ate them. It took an hour to take his school lesson and a bit less than that to actually make them at home with me. I hope they return to enabling children to cook from scratch, understand where food comes from and what processing does to it. It's one small part of eating sensibly, and education can do so much to help children understand nutrition, but so can parents and grandparents, by building on what they do in school.

I have just read through this thread for the first time. I was a Home Economics teacher who had to re-invent myself as a Food Technology teacher when National Curriculum came in. In my humble opinion it was the worst thing that happened to the subject. In my school we were lucky - we kept all our practical rooms but others did away with them completely because it was now a 'technology' subject and as long as other 'technology' subjects were offered on the syllabus it was ok.
We stopped the emphasis on practical skills re-inforced with theoretical knowledge and started teaching from an industrial perspective. The lessons length was also reduced - ever tried to teach 20 kids how to make even a simple dish (and get them all cooked in 6 ovens) in 1 hour 10 mins ?
It was scones and pizza ad infinitum. They were shown how to make scones, they made scones, they designed a 'new' scone, they made it, they designed a 'new improved' scone, they made it. The final lesson in half a term's work was to design a b****y box to put them in !
Inspiring or what ??
In the 'old days' I would have taught kids of the same age every type of pastry in the same half term and they would have been making a full meal for a family by the time they were 15. I am not saying that everything was better then but at least most kids (especially those who were deemed not very academic!) left school with good practical skills and a knowledge of nutrition.
It was also a time when in order to teach Home Economics you had to have been trained in the subject. Not any more - it seems that if you can teach 'technology' then you should be able to teach across the whole range of subjects and so they do. It's a bit like asking a plumber to re-wire your house!
Being made redundant was the best thing that happened to me !!!

There is also a certain Them and Us attitude. "They" only want to stop us smoking because we enjoy it, which was very prevalent when I had my children," They" only want us to stop eating junk food because we enjoy it. There really are children at my grandson's school who are fed on Pot Noodles because their mothers consider them a treat. Poverty doesn't necessarily come into it, it's lack of education and lack of interest.

Perhaps some obesity is more directly linked to self esteem, than to poverty and that Poverty is a symptom of behavioural patterns with regard to poor self esteem, educational attainment and work chances. A chicken and egg situation.

Some very poor families do raise confident, well educated and successful children which must suggest factors other than poverty play a role in this.

Think the remark was more about eating breakfast buns. Presumably rich classy people eat smoked salmon and scrambled egg or eggs benedict? Hence the poor eat stodgy rubbishy food and put on weight more.

Yes, I agree. Not sure it is a recent trend - I myself had only one cooking lesson at school ( rock cakes - pretty b awful as I recall) but that was only because I took Latin and there wasn't enough space on the timetable to do domestic science too. But the emphasis does seem to have shifted now from actual cooking to the theory of nutrition. In an ideal world there would be a place for basic life skills, not just cooking but budgeting and so on.

I have not read all the thread so I may be repeating what has already been said. I have a weight problem but eat very healthy and everything cooked from scratch, I didn't have a very healthy childhood and this is probably the root cause. My Mum is/was the worst cook you could imagine money was very tight and yes we sometimes had white bread and dripping for a meal. I have seen the advertisements for Farm Foods where you can buy the ingredients to make a good cheap meal but I don't think this generation have the skills to do so, I feel schools need to go back to the home economic classes to try to turn this ready meal trend around.

We seem to have morphed from one sort of class to quite a different sort.

Yes absent, I remember the DDs' food tech lessons too - they have been a family joke for years. The first homework was to prepare not a meal but a brochure for a meal on an airline flight. The most bizarre was a "fish pie" which consisted of a small casserole dish with a side plate balanced on top as a lid, and on the plate a beautifully forked topping of mashed potato. Tasty. It was just for a photo for her coursework folder, as there had not ben enough time during class.

Food technology is quite different from cookery lessons and the classes are much less practical. Absentdaughter's very first piece of food tech homework was to create a commercial snack with ingredients that would be available and at the same price all the year round. As a cookery writer I was able to help and advise but to do it "properly" took us several hours. Learning how to make an omelette, a pan of vegetable soup or a homemade hamburger would have been a lot more useful.

We only did a little cookery at school because we had to fit in latin lessons as well, but we did learn some basic dishes such as rhubarb crumble and jacket potatoes and I came away with the idea that cooking was possible and if I looked at a few cookery books I should be able to crack it. I'm not sure I would have got the same confidence from a food technology class.

I stood in a lift once listening to the conversation between two girls one of whom had tried to boil rice to go with a supermarket curry, when a complete ready meal had been unavailable. She found it impossible to get it to cook and wouldnt try and cook rice again.

Deedaa I think cookery skills of any sort are sadly lacking in many instances. Other Gransnetters have suggested a return to proper cookery classes in school and I certainly endorse that idea. I have encountered all kinds of ignorance about preparing and cooking food that it is almost impossible to believe. How about the person who put an egg in a saucepan and set it on the gas for 2 minutes to boil? She didn't know that you have to boil it in water. Or the check-out assistant in a large supermarket who failed to recognise a bunch of carrots with the tops on and insisted on ringing for the supervisor to identify the vegetable because "carrots don't have leaves"?

absent I know it is possible to cook with fresh ingredients in a microwave, I used to do it a lot myself. But I do think you need a reasonable level of cookery skills to be successful and I'm not convinced all these girls have that. Another problem is that so many of them construe advice as being somehow against them. I remember when I was in hospital before my son was born I was in a room with some girls whose babies were going to be small for their dates, probably because they smoked. They kept sneaking out for a smoke and said that the advice to stop smoking was "just THEM trying to stop us enjoying ourselves" I think that this attitude is still around when it comes to smoking drinking or living on takeaways.

My DS classes only taught me to make cakes!

My mother was to put it politely an 'adequate' cook and my MiL was worse. How does that explain that DH and I normally eat a lot of veg and fresh fruit and only rarely have anything processed. Most meals are made from fresh ingredients.

When DS3 lived in a bedsit in London at a young age there was only a microwave so we bought him a grill with 2 rings on top on which he managed to make proper meals. All 3 DSs cook proper dinners but not puds.

I think that obesity is very rarely inherited but more likely upbringing. Actually I think that obesity is almost always down to what we eat. I am hypothyroid so have to eat less than everyone else to be a healthy weight. I could use that as an excuse for obesity but instead am a bit overweight and trying to do something about it.

Obesity has always been linked with poverty because poor people can only afford to buy cheap, high fat, heavily processed carbohydrate foods.

In the late 1940s when I was about 6 we moved from London to Carlisle and where we lived in Carlisle was just across the road from an area of poor housing and even at the age of 6 i noticed a lot of fat older women about, something I hadnt seen where we lived in London. I asked my mother why these women were so fat. She told me that they came from poor families and the women tended to live on white bread and margarine because what decent food they could afford went first to their husband then the children and they came last when it came to eating.

Deedaa It is perfectly possible to cook meals from fresh ingredients in a microwave. I prefer to use a conventional gas hob/electric oven combination but if I had only a microwave, nothing on earth would make me live on ready meals.

Another problem is the youngsters on benefits who are provided with a microwave rather than a proper cooker and pretty much condemned to a life of ready meals and take aways. Perhaps as well as get you into work courses there should be some how to look after yourself courses. The combination of no money, no job, and no home guidance on budgeting, shopping, cooking and sewing is just storing up trouble.

That must be so difficult to live with ninathenana . The trouble with these blanket statements is they are just statements of statistical information, but we are all tempted to apply them to ourselves.

Fortunately I have never thought of myself as living in poverty. My mother, daughter and myself are all classed as obese. But then we have all suffered from PCOS.

Sadly 'beige food' is cheaper. However, I'm not sure if it's a class thing or not. A lot of working class women in the past did feed their families well on cheaper, but home made food. Nowadays people prefer to sit in front of the TV, play their X-boxes, talk on their mobiles etc. Plenty of households do not have a dining room table. Plenty eat in front of the TV with their plate of beige food. A girl at work told me that everyone goes into the kitchen, picks up their plate of food and goes off to watch TV or even into their own room, with own Tv to watch own programme. A lot of families do not sit around a table together eating and going over their day. I have memories of Sunday lunch [a roast of course] sitting round the dining room table with my parents and grandparents watching everyone adult having a row about something. It was huge fun. However, we also sat around that table roaring with laughter. Work now is almost a 24 hour thing, shops open all hours - someone has to work in them. So people have different days off. Cooking is no longer taught in schools - now its food technology - learning about vitamens etc, but can you make a decent meal. In a lot of cases it's easier, but not cheaper, to buy a ready meal.

That's moi!

A BBW is a big, beautiful woman.