KEY POINTS:
'My family's risotto comes in a packet." Sharlene Tuhipa smiles shyly. "You take it out of the packet and measure everything. You go by every line, every direction on the packet and then you think 'oh, is it really supposed to look like that?"' She giggles. It's a surprisingly girlish tinkle from someone of 38. But Tuhipa knows her two kids won't have to eat pre-packaged risotto again. She has just learned how to cook risotto from scratch, with an onion, capsicum, mushrooms and proper arborio rice. She can't believe how easy it is. And now she knows what the real thing should look - and taste - like.
In the smallish commercial kitchen at the Salvation Army's Auckland City ministry in Royal Oak, she and a small group of women and one man have helped chop the vegetables then watched as tutors Pauleen Richards and Catherine Beyer demonstrated one of Italy's traditional comfort foods using a not-very-traditional electric frying pan.
Gourmets would be aghast at the method, of course, but the result is a minor miracle to this class. "It was great, it was different," Tuhipa says. "I've never cooked rice like that." It is week three of this eight-week cooking course.
Most attending are required to be here. It's a condition of staying in the Salvation Army's "transitional" housing which provides emergency accommodation for those, mostly women with kids, who find themselves with nowhere to live. The class began as a two-week affair - as part of a broader "life skills" programme which includes budgeting and goal-setting - before client demand for a more comprehensive cooking course pushed it out to eight weeks. That was a couple of years ago.
Up to 60 people have been through this kitchen since then. For many, like Tuhipa, the classes aren't so much about learning how to cook as learning how to cook better. "Some people come in with quite good cooking skills, but they're cooking absolute rubbish, quite high fat food and they're using quite poor ingredients. But they can cook," says Richards, the ministry's community health co-ordinator. "Then you've got people who don't cook because they can't be bothered, it's easier to get takeaways or they'll go to other people's houses to eat and they eat whatever is on offer." And then there are those who have no idea how to boil an egg.
Jamie Oliver isn't everyone's creme brulee. But the maddening mockney chef seems to have hit on something fundamental in his latest television cooking show, the four-part Ministry of Food, which finishes its run on TV One on Tuesday night. No chickens were murdered in the making of this particular show. No turkey twizzlers, either.
Instead, Oliver's latest fit of cooking conscience has underlined a reality that is at once obvious but also disquieting given it concerns a principal building block for a healthy society: there are many people who cannot cook even the most basic, healthy meal.
In the first episode of Ministry of Food, Oliver met Natasha, a woman in her early 20s with two pre-school children who had never cooked a meal for them. Instead she spent around £70 ($186) of her £80 benefit on takeaways and junk food. Her eldest child was already suffering from poor dental health.
Health campaigners in New Zealand will tell you there are Natashas here, too. Canvas spoke to nutritionists, public health workers and cooking tutors from around the country and all confirmed New Zealand - mirroring Britain - has a significant problem with a lack of basic cooking skills.
Richards says her students don't really like to talk about it, but will eventually admit they and their families eat takeaway food four or five times a week. And on the nights they're not eating takeaways, they're consuming home-made food which is just as high in the three killers: fat, salt and sugar.
"The majority of our families on lower incomes are absolutely eating rubbish, no doubt about it," she says. "You go and sit by a dairy near a school and just watch what those kids are eating before and after school, it just makes you feel ill, it really does. And that's what they are eating every day." While the allegedly time-poor, over-worked New Zealand middle classes are as likely as any to opt for pre-prepared or takeaway food, a great many of those who can't or don't cook - though no exact figures appear to exist - are reportedly and anecdotally among some of our society's most socially and financially vulnerable, and the most exposed to ill health. Those of Pacific or Maori heritage are more likely to eat badly.
A recent survey of New Zealand health found that Pacific boys and girls were twice as likely to have eaten fast food three or more times during any given week compared with the total population, while Maori girls are 1.5 more likely to do so than all other girls. We're fat and getting fatter. That's hardly news, of course.
Along with everything else, we've been fed a diet of disturbing statistics in recent years telling us just how blubbery we are, and the cost in lives. Two out of every five deaths each year - approximately 11,000 - are due to nutrition risk factors including high cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity and inadequate fruit and vegetable intake.
Between 8000 and 9000 of these deaths are believed due to dietary factors alone. While the latest research suggests the rate of increase in obesity appears to be slowing, it is still increasing.
According to the Ministry of Health around a quarter of men and women and around eight per cent of children are classed as obese. Another ministry report found that the socio-economic status of an individual, a household and a neighbourhood are "strongly associated" with obesity. The inter-relationship between of all these factors - diet, social status, ethnicity and ill health - is complex. But if a healthy diet is the end game, the kitchen is where it all begins. Or should be.
For those who can't or don't cook, the kitchen is just another room. The question, of course, is: Why?
Food is no longer simply food. It's entertainment. Television has made it so and on almost any given night a family may sit down to watch a celebrity chef doing something exciting with prosciutto and rocket while they themselves consume a jumbo bucket of fried chicken. Television has made food the stuff of competition (Hell's Kitchen, Top Chef), of machismo (Anthony Bourdain or Gordon Ramsay), of soft porn (Nigella Lawson licking food off her fingers) or a travelogue of exotic places and their exotic ingredients (Rick Stein et al). But if food is now TV entertainment, advertising - particularly TV advertising - has made cooking one's own food something much less fun.
When your grandmother or great-grandmother ruled the kitchen, cooking was a major component of a household's life. The kitchen was always the warmest room. Fantastic smells emanated from there. It was the centre for conversation at meal times and it was where you were fed, good and proper. But the kitchen has now became a place to be avoided.
"Suddenly we're being told cooking's a chore, it's something that you shouldn't be doing, tired people shouldn't have to cook," says Bronwen King, a Christchurch public health nutritionist and the chair of the Obesity Action Council. "Yet there is more [TV] screen time happening for cooking than ever before ... but people are cooking less and less."
King maintains we are now in a world where food technology has gone mad, a world where huge food corporations compete for market share by bombarding consumers with a multitude of products that supposedly make life easy. The ingredients in these foods push buttons - lots of sugar, fat and salt - while much of the "good" components of food are stripped out in the processing. "We've got foods that become quite addictive and we've got them thrust under our noses ... and we've also got the other subtle kind of messaging happening through all the marketing that cooking is a chore, an add-on to life rather than a part of life."
At the same time, King contends, cooking is being dumbed down. Whereas even 10 years ago the food industry might have been talking about ingredients, putting together dishes using marinades, herbs and spices and cutting up vegetables, now the message is likely to be about grabbling a packet of frozen vegetables, a jar of pasta sauce and meat that's already been sliced or diced for you.
"It's construction, not cooking. But even that's now a big step for people: doing a stir-fry using a jar of sauce, a packet of veges and bit of meat. That's what we feel is now achievable for people, whereas 10 years ago we would have been teaching them how to chop the vegetables, how to make their own stir-fry. "It's really appealing to our lazy gene and at the same time it's leading to a loss of skills. Whereas parents passed skills down to their children, they are not doing that now."
Pass it on. This was central to Oliver's Ministry of Food - his mission was to train eight people who would each teach two more, each of who would teach two more and so on. Ironically, of course, passing it on was what mothers and grandmothers used to do. But an inter-generational rent seems to have occurred in the last 30 years. Rosie Shand, a lecturer in food safety and nutrition at the Waiariki Institute of Technology in Rotorua, believes the reason could be as simple as this: working mothers.
"I think we have a gap where it hasn't passed down from granny to mother. Suddenly mother was the one working, so therefore we're now into ease of preparation." Nicki Martin, health improvement manager for Waikato Primary Health in Hamilton, agrees there is a generation where the skills weren't being passed on.
"I'm not feminist in any way, but women have actually escaped from home and gone to work. One of the side effects of that is kids are not being taught at home how to whisk an egg or [make] an omelette or bake a cake. It's dropping off as a priority, both at home and at school." She believes the cooking crisis has arisen because people genuinely don't know what to do with an egg or with pasta or a tin of tomatoes - and they're too embarrassed to ask somebody. "It's almost like reading and writing. I think people genuinely want to cook. When they see what's going on with their waist ... and with their kids' waistlines as well, I think people genuinely do want to know how to cook a healthy meal at home."
At the Salvation Army's Auckland City ministry, Richards has another theory. A lot of the problem, she has observed, comes down to lack of motivation. "It's got to coincide with parenting because that's where children are learning their eating habits. We've got an absolute collapse in parenting. People just don't know what they are doing. They can't enforce anything with their kids. What the kids eat is up to them. So it starts there. "You've got to give them the right parenting tools so they can say to their children 'this is what's for dinner'.
They'll say 'oh, my kid won't eat that'. I've had to say to mothers, 'you know what? You need to send your children to bed hungry, it's not going to kill them. You insist they eat it or they go to bed hungry'.
Instead, you've got 3-year-olds helping themselves to whatever they can find in the fridge. The kids rule. If their kids want to sit down with a whole packet of Toffee Pops and eat them - and they do it in front of you while you're visiting - then they're going to do it.
That's what's going on in our families." If there's been an inter-generational disconnection around basic home cooking skills, Richards' experience seems to suggest another factor at play too: there may also be disengagement between what people are told and what they do. Healthy lifestyle promotion is a whole industry in itself, with the government and its agencies encouraging us all to be more active through programmes such as Sport & Recreation New Zealand's Push Play and the Ministry of Health's over-arching health and well-being framework, Health Eating - Healthy Action, or HEHA. We've been cajoled and encouraged and educated, particularly since Labour took office.
Yet social marketing appears to have its limitations. A 2007 audience research report prepared for the Health Sponsorship Council found that healthy eating was of "low to moderate concern" for families. Not all people understood that a good diet was a key contributing factor to good physical health.
Researchers found it a "relatively common" belief that being physically active and not overweight was evidence of good physical health - regardless of diet.
Pass it on. If older generations haven't done it then someone else needs to. But who? In Lower Hutt in 1994 a group of older women and some men whose families had left the nest decided they wanted to do just that for others, pass it on. They called themselves Supergrans. There are now nine Supergrans organisations around the country, with the largest in Christchurch.
Its manager, Zoe Manley, says her 27 volunteers deal with an average of 30 to 40 client families a month, mentoring them in everything from cooking to budgeting. "A lot of the people who access our services also have low literacy or numeracy skills, so basically they can't read. They can't read recipes, they can't read labels - so they tend to go for pre-packaged things that are not only more expensive but also often have high salt and high sugar content so they're not healthy for them.
What we're showing them is they could cook a very healthy, tasty meal economically, which would actually be cheaper than the cheapest takeaway for a family." The success of Supergrans has led to Family and Community Services (FCS, a branch of the Ministry of Social Development) funding a programme called SAGES, a $1.1 million-a-year scheme which supports 17 non-government organisations (including those offered by the Salvation Army's ministry in South Auckland) providing mentoring in such things as basic cooking.
SAGES is just one of 35 community-based programmes funded or managed by FCS to support families. Other government-funded organisations are responding directly to our cooking crisis. In Rotorua, Rosie Shand is involved in a partnership between Waiariki Institute and the local Public Health Organisation (PHO) which has spent two years developing a basic cooking skills project called Pataka Kai.
In the Waikato, Nicki Martin is helping develop a similar PHO programme called Get Cooking, based on a British model. In Christchurch, Bronwen King is involved in another PHO-sponsored course based around a cookbook developed by the Nelson-Marlborough District Health Board. There are others. But nationally the teaching of basic cooking skills has something of an ad hoc appearance, possibly because it tends to be - and needs to be, according to those who run them - a community-based response to need. Each has struggled with funding - and an understanding from the public of just how important it is to pass cooking proficiency on.
So perhaps the irritating Mr Oliver and his Ministry of Food are just what's been needed to raise public awareness. Or maybe not. "We've been a bit swamped over the last couple of years with Jamie Oliver," says Martin.
"If we want that message to really impact on New Zealand citizens, then it really needs to be someone who's got the New Zealand accent and is talking about Countdown rather than Tesco's. It needs to be someone we can all relate to, not some young, multimillionaire chef."
