The bandwagon for Jamie Oliver’s school-meals campaign is experiencing a bumpy ride, and may even stall. Britain’s most popular television chef persuaded 271,677 parents to sign his online petition, and a nervous government speedily issued promises to impose new nutritional standards. However, real-world practicalities, such as the financial penalties of opting out of long-term catering contracts, are making it difficult for schools to expel junk-food menus. The fight will continue, but, in the meantime, much more can be done to improve children’s diets and help them develop a healthier relationship with food.

Oliver made clever use of the internet to garner support and disseminate advice, proving that it is an effective campaign tool. Now the time has come to employ the web and other forms of new tech- nology to educate children about healthy cooking and eating. Not only is it possible, it is arguably one of the best means of achieving results; for new technology offers benefits that traditional formats, such as books and even television, do not provide.

Sue Todd, a trained nutritionist, is executive producer of the UKTV Food channel’s website and secretary of the Caroline Walker Trust, an organisation that has campaigned for many years to improve the nutritional content of school meals. She firmly believes that the web has a role to play in educating children about food and teaching them to cook. “Video clips are crucial to making it work well,” she emphasises, “particularly instructional clips, playable on demand.”

UKTV Food’s site receives many e-mails from children asking for more information about food, usually for homework. The fact that the videos are gleaned from Great Food Live, a daily cable-TV programme aimed at adults, is not, Todd says, a barrier to their usefulness — indeed, she feels that some of the content is potentially useful for GCSE-level studies. “We can supply plenty of good recipes suited to a young audience, a mix of classic and modern dishes that children like to cook. We are now trying to select more clips that highlight particular cooking techniques and show how to prepare different ingredients.”

Jenny Ridgwell, a former home- economics teacher who now writes and publishes a variety of food-related books, CD-Roms and videos for teachers and secondary-school students, believes that recipe-demonstration clips on DVD or CD could help in the classroom environment, too, by saving teachers vital pre- paration time — important when there are only 55 minutes for a lesson. They could easily be played on the classroom’s interactive whiteboard.

As Ridgwell points out, it is something of a myth that cookery is no longer taught in schools. Food technology fits neatly into the national curriculum, and practical cookery as well as nutrition meet the criteria for the subject, in that children explore, compare, analyse, evaluate and so on.

While it is now feasible to watch cookery DVDs in home kitchens (Ridgwell’s son set up a laptop in the family kitchen), research by the London School of Economics reveals that, although computer ownership and home internet access is growing, only 60% of working-class children have accessed the internet at home, compared with 90% of middle-class children. Such figures suggest that those who could potentially benefit most from education about healthy food disseminated over the web are unlikely to, due to lack of access and lack of skilled parental encouragement. School-based food education therefore remains essential.

Jane Cassidy, editor of learning at BBC Northern Ireland, has another concern. “There is a paucity of websites teaching children to cook, for the obvious reason that there is a crucial safety issue involved. Cooking involves using a cooker and heating things, often to boiling point, so no responsible adult will want to encourage children to try cooking without supervision.”

As Cassidy points out, the children’s cookery sites that do exist (such as the CBBC’s Xchange website’s Food Makes pages) usually offer ideas for salads and simple desserts that don’t involve heat. “That said, I know my children enjoy the many cookery programmes on tele- vision, and have learnt a great deal from watching those.”

Surprised? Why? Cooking is fun, says Sue Lawrence, president of the Guild of Food Writers, and teaching children to cook is the best way to encourage a long-term healthy relationship with food. “It is of crucial importance to involve children in cooking,” she says. “This is not only so they learn practical skills, but to help them understand the provenance of the food, and that freshly cooked is always better than processed, both from a nutritional point of view and in terms of taste.”

Fourteen-year-old Gina Pickles dis-covered the fun of cooking while working her way through the home cookery course available from the Sticky Mitts website. “The sheer enjoyment Gina and her friends get out of it is enormous,” says Gina’s mother, Sandra, who also credits learning to cook through Sticky Mitts with improving Gina’s self- confidence and her ability to think through issues sequentially.

“It’s one of the best things we’ve ever done with the children,” Sandra says. “Gina is beginning to realise that she can cook nice food more cheaply than buying it ready-made, and she has already learnt more cooking techniques than I use in everyday life.”

As a benefit to children working through the home cooking courses, the Sticky Mitts site has a password- protected area called Sticky Kids, featuring extra recipes, seasonal shopping tips, quizzes and a page for posting drawings and photographs of the dishes the children have enjoyed — and good times had while cooking. “This has proved a great asset because it’s something you don’t get from buying a recipe book,” says the site’s founder, Vanessa Miller.

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