Schools should bring back home economics classes to help fight obesity, experts argue

I never took a home economics class. Those courses may have been gone from my Maryland school district by the time I entered middle school.

But there have been times in my adult life — particularly when I got my first apartment after college and was trying to teach myself how to cook on a shoestring budget — when I wished I had taken such a course. (I remember staring at a cauliflower in my kitchen, wondering what exactly I was supposed to do with it. This was before you could Google “how to prepare cauliflower” and receive 594,000 hits in .22 seconds.)

It’s precisely for that reason — because so few adults know how to prepare nutritious foods at home with inexpensive basic ingredients — that mandatory home economics classes should be brought back to schools, argue Alice Lichtenstein, a professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University, and Dr. David Ludwig, a pediatric endocrinologist at Children’s Hospital Boston.

Writing in a commentary in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association, Lichtenstein and Ludwig suggest that such classes, if designed right, could help stem the United States’ pervasive weight problem.  Some 67 percent of American adults — and 35 percent of adolescents — are either overweight or obese.

Of course, they’re not suggesting we return to the gender-stereotyped home economics coursework of old. Rather, they write,

“… girls and boys should be taught the basic principles they will need to feed themselves and their families within the current food environment: a version of hunting and gathering for the 21st century. Through a combination of pragmatic instruction, field trips, and demonstrations, this curriculum would aim to transform meal preparation from an intimidating chore into a manageable and rewarding pursuit. As children transition into young adulthood, they should be provided with knowledge to harness modern conveniences (eg, prewashed salad greens) and avoid pitfalls in the marketplace (eg, prepared foods with a high ratio of calories to nutrients) to prepare meals that are quick, nutritious, and tasty. It is important to dispel the myths — aggressively promoted by some in the food industry — that cooking takes too much time or skill and that nutritious food cannot also be delicious.”

Although they praise current efforts to address obesity in youth, like Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, Lichtenstein and Ludwig say such efforts can achieve only limited success. “[P]owerful forces undermine these efforts, such as the ubiquitous advertising of foods and beverages high in calories and low in nutrient content,” they write.

And, indeed, more than a third of the total calories consumed by children and adolescents come from eating meals and snacks prepared away from home — foods that are usually high in calories and low in nutrition.

“Many parents never learned to cook and instead rely on restaurants, take-out food, frozen meals, and packaged food as basic fare,” write Lichtenstein and Ludwig. “Many children seldom experience what a true home-cooked meal tastes like, much less see what goes into preparing it. Work schedules and child extracurricular programs frequently preclude involving children in food shopping and preparation. The family dinner has become the exception rather than the rule.”

We’ll see if their argument gets any traction, particularly now, when school budgets are being slashed everywhere. (I would expect some strong pushback from the food industry as well.) Yet, as Lichtenstein and Ludwig point out, obesity costs the United States $150 billion annually in increased health care expenditures. Then there are the personal health costs, including a startling rise in type 2 diabetes among adolescents.

“[M]any U.S. schools provide information and guidance about tobacco, alcohol, drugs, sexually transmitted disease, and pregnancy,” write Lichtenstein and Ludwig. “They should do the same about one of the most fundamental of human activities: eating.”