The Great Skills Drop

A link to this article from the Soil Association landed in my inbox this morning. It's coincided with my own minor crisis of confidence (a particularly hard to assemble piece of garden equipment, if you were wondering), so I thought I'd give it a bit more attention here.

According to the SA, 45% of us think we have fewer cooking skills than our grandparent’s generation, 47% say they are less able to grow their own food, while 48% have lost the rural craft skills that make self sufficiency possible and 51% say they would have no idea how to rear animals.

It's the the fewer cooking skills bit that stands out for me. Yes, we're supposed to be a nation of food lovers, but it seems like we still need people like Niger Slater to tell that we don't need to follow recipes to the letter, while Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking may have kicked up a bit of stink but has been selling by the trolley-load.

And, it follows, that if we know less about how to cook, we know less about ingredients – how they taste, how they look, how they grow. I'd like to point out now that this is my own pretty arbitrary theory, but I think there might be something in it. The same goes with rearing animals – what is sold pre-cut and pre-packaged has so little resemblance to where it came from that it's no wonder some people are bit unsure what to do.

As a side note, I've deliberately not mentioned that a 'staggering 92%' think skills like this are more important because of the recession. They've always been important and always will be, no matter what part of the boom and bust cycle we're in.

Edwin