FOOD EDUCATION IN ENGLAND

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25572, 27 June 1944, Page 3

FOOD EDUCATION IN ENGLAND

HOME SCIENCE GRADUATE’S WORK

Food production, rigid control of the distribution of food, and education in nutrition and food preparation have together made possible the continued good health of British people, in spite of Germany’s worst efforts to bring them to starvation, states Mr A. A. Hardcastle, a member of the press delegation which recently visited Great Britain at the invitation of the British Ministry of Information.

The third factor, he says, food education, has been, and still is, of great importance, for British cooks were not good cooks. Lord Woolton, the man who deserves most thanks for the wonderful success of war-time fcod supply, had this story to say about their home cooking: " When the war is over, is Britain to go back to the old ideas of food as being mainly a matter of appetite and not a matter of health? Before the war we were careless, had a badly-balanced diet, and, truth and shame to tell, had just about as bad cooking as could be found in the world.” In the universities. Lord Woolton said, the attention given to food preparation was almost negligible and the cooking itself was " extraordinarily bad," and in the schools cooking was treated as a matter of supreme indifference. So he looked outside English universities and schools of home science for a leader in better cooking, and appointed a New Zealand graduate, Mrs E. Nilson, formerly Miss Anabelle Powell, of Christchurch, who graduated B.H.Sc. from the University of Otago. In the same building as the Minister’s office (Colonel Llewellyn is now Minister of Fooil there are two working kitchens. Mrs Nilson and graduates in home science work in one. From women’s councils and Farmers’ Union auxiliaries and from individuals all over Britain home recipes and queries pour in. These graduate cooks bake and boil and sample all the day, all the week, the recipes and ideas, good and cranky, put before them, and write the worth-while ideas down.

•The second kitchen is run by just cooks, housewives, and single girls who are chosen because they have no practised skill. If the graduates' succeses turn out sog in the second kitchen, then either the written recipe is wrong or is too elaborate or too tricky, and so must be revised or discarded; but if success follows success, the recipe can go out with the mark of approval of the Ministry, back to the council and institutes, printed in pamphlets, and demonstrated in lecture kitchens through the country. There is no variety of raw foods, and this careful searching for new disguises for the same old repetition is important. There is a canteen in the Ministry office (as there is in every establishment where there are 250 or more employees), and the Ministry has the best canteen eats in all England, with plenty of variety in the look of the food anyway. The No. 1 kitchen is doing good work, too, in putting proprietary foods for which all sorts of claims are made into the test tube. Where variety is so limited anything that offers novelty has a market, and fake manufacturers would be on velvet if no check were kept on their claims. Several acclaimed lines have been shown to be rubbish: one cannot get away with that sort of food business in Britain to-day. When things were worst there were demonstrations, in the street and outdoors, of how to prepare food over open fires. Working with the Departments of Agriculture, Fisheries, Supply, lail and road transport, the Ministry of Food has established one of Britain’s greatest and most successful war but the people there would cheerfully give up scientific soundness now and then for some of the frills that make to-day’s breakfast different from yesterday’s.