Exercise 4 Cooking

Read the following article by a cookery teacher. Write a summary of the advantages for young people if they learn how to cook.

“I grew up in a family where cooking was an important part of life. I have always been really choosy with my food. I never liked to see vegetables on my plate and if they did appear, I used to find naughty ways of making them disappear. I was lucky, however, that I always had plenty of fish and seafood in my diet. Vegetables eventually became an important part of each meal when I went to college and spent more time cooking for myself.

You might be interested to know that the human body has two periods of accelerated growth during our lives, and both happen when we are young. The first one is when we are born and during the first few months of our life. The second period is adolescence when we need to develop the muscles and bones for adulthood. A regular intake of calcium and iron is essential during this period.

With this in mind, encouraging our children to eat food with high calcium and iron content is the responsibility of the parents. It is during this period that we should encourage children to start cooking, to try different recipes and make nutritious food part of their daily routine. It is easier for children to eat something that has been prepared with their own hands, and discover how a simple vegetable changes when it becomes part of a delicious soup, stew or salad. This is what we have experienced at our cookery school. We have taught children who didn’t like certain foods, and then gradually after some classes, they began cooking for themselves and enjoyed dishes that they would not previously have eaten.

Teaching children at school has been a great experience for me. I find it amazing to watch children being able to produce flavoursome meals using vegetables, eggs and fish, then setting the table and serving the food.

It is also lovely to see the friendships that are established between the children, enjoying their culinary masterpieces with one another in a fun and friendly environment.

In the kitchen, children who cook learn different skills that they will keep forever. They all have different backgrounds and habits. However, in a kitchen, everybody is important, and it doesn’t matter if you are tall or short, male or female, athletic or academic; cooking is for all ages and levels. They develop team skills and learn to appreciate that each individual’s contribution is vital for the group.

If children cook, there is no doubt that they have a better diet, which will benefit their health for the rest of their lives. My primary goal as a teacher is to encourage my students to develop these good habits from an early age. Maybe some of my students will take this further and decide to follow a career related to cooking. This is an industry which is growing all over the world and we need well-trained cooks everywhere.

If children enjoy cooking, it is really easy to encourage them. Why not take them for dinner or even buy them their own cooking utensils? Preparing breakfast together at the weekend is a good time to get them started and it’s a great way to spend quality time as a family.”