People striving to be healthier need to know basic food skills not become masterchefs
IT doesn’t matter if you can make the perfect bechamel sauce or roast chicken. Turns out being able to plan a weekly meal or use up leftovers will serve you better.
NSW
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PEOPLE should be taught to be ‘masters of their own kitchens’ instead of ‘masterchefs’ to help them lead healthier lives, new Australian research reveals.
The survey of 1,000 Australians made a surprise finding: good ‘food skills’ not incredible cooking aptitude resulted in better quality diets.
Being able to budget and plan a weekly menu, use up leftovers, read and interpret labels and throw a meal together, was more important than having superior cooking skills like baking, stewing or making sauces.
Dietitians Anna-Jane Debenham and Alexandra Parker, both 27, run wellness company The Biting Truth and told The Daily Telegraph they both agreed learning the health basics was more important than being a culinary master.
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“A lot of the meals you see cooked by professional chefs or on shows like MasterChef are actually filled with butter, salt and sugar and are not very healthy at all,” Ms Debenham said.
“We say all the time that some of the healthiest meals are actually the basic ones.”
Ms Parker said cooking elaborate meals also wasn’t realistic for most people.
“We’re very time poor, so for those trying to get healthier, simple, quick meals really are better,” she said.
The findings, presented at the Dietitians Association of Australia national conference, didn’t uncover any differences between people’s diets and skills based on socio-economic background or education.
Around 6 in 10 Australians are either overweight or obese and in the past two decades the proportion of people who are ‘severely obese’ nearly doubled.
In a bid to improve the diets of the next generation Detitian Professor Clare Collins said children should be taught basic food skills, like being able to plan and budget.
“Being the master of your own kitchen is a life skill that we need to learn,” she said.
A recent US study found people who did not cook frequently spent the same amount on groceries as people who did.
“I think it’s likely that they don’t have the food skills so they aspirationally buy the ingredients, but then don’t know what to do with them, so end up just getting pizza.”
Chef and mother Jen Petrovic (pictured) helped develop an app called PlanBuyCook, for people to plan their weekly meals.
Some strategies she employs are cooking four meals a week and doubling two of them to freeze, having a ‘leftovers meal’ where everyone eats something different and always having a pantry meal, such as tuna pasta, that can be easily pulled together from non-perishable items.