Niki Bezzant: Kids in the kitchen boost wellbeing

Some schools encourage their pupils to grow vegetables. Photo / Doug Sherring

What's the best thing to learn if you want to guarantee you're eating a healthy diet? Knowing basic nutrition would be a good idea; learning to read labels might be handy. But you may not need to know these things if you have another basic but increasingly less common skill: cooking.

We have much more control over what we put into our bodies when we know how to cook. When we don't cook, we hand the responsibility for our wellbeing to a fast-food outlet, a restaurant or a food manufacturer.

Sometimes we travel or life gets in the way of getting into the kitchen. But if we do this routinely, it's more difficult to eat a well-balanced diet.

I recently helped judge the Just Cook Challenge, a competition for school students run by the New Zealand Nutrition Foundation. Students enter their original recipes for easy, nutritious family meals. I was impressed with the quality and creativity of these young cooks, who had all come up with interesting and tasty dinners to appeal to kids and parents. It's not MasterChef stuff; it's food a family can get on the table and enjoy together.

The interest from kids in Just Cook is encouraging, because learning to cook is not something we can assume our kids are doing at school any more. When I went to school, we all trundled off to what was called "home economics" classes, where we learned basic cooking skills.

We may not remember with fondness the hokey pencil cases or rock-hard scones we produced but I was left with skills that have proved useful my whole life. Today, home economics has given way to "technology" classes, which may or may not include cooking. It's not usually compulsory, so there's every chance kids can get to the end of their school career having had little, if any, food education.

There's still the opportunity to learn to cook at home, although research suggests this is increasingly less likely. A review published in 2013 by Massey University's Institute of Food Nutrition and Human Health reported just 8 per cent of parents said their children helped with cooking several times a week, and 16 per cent said their children never did. Forty per cent of children rarely or never had the opportunity to learn cooking skills at home.

The review concluded: "This has created a culture that is increasingly dependent on prepared and packaged foods, many of which have been shown to be detrimental to health. It is likely that a focus on cooking skill provision in schools will help produce a more food-literate and therefore more food-secure and healthy population."

Many schools are initiating programmes about growing and cooking food. The Garden to Table programme helps primary-aged kids engage with the source of their food in the garden and teaches them what to do with what they've grown.

And of course many parents understand that equipping kids with the skills to put a meal on the table — even if it's just an omelette or a simple mince dish — is one of the greatest possible gifts they can give.

• Niki Bezzant is editor-in-chief of Healthy Food Guide magazine.