Lessons for little chefs

Weaned on ready meals and junk food, many children now think spaghetti grows on trees. Caroline Stacey visits a school for educating palates

"I know how sandwiches started. This guy, right, he was playing PlayStation, and he told his servant to get two slices of bread to put his dinner in." In the purple kitchen, the three boys from Year 6 are so desperate to show that they know the answers to questions about food that they're pogo-ing up and down with unrestrained excitement.

"I know how sandwiches started. This guy, right, he was playing PlayStation, and he told his servant to get two slices of bread to put his dinner in." In the purple kitchen, the three boys from Year 6 are so desperate to show that they know the answers to questions about food that they're pogo-ing up and down with unrestrained excitement.

They've all made something healthy(ish) to eat (tortilla wraps filled with combinations of tomato, cheese, avocado, tuna and sweetcorn), and proved that they know the benefits of protein (by showing off their muscles). Now they're identifying foods by smell and feel. "I know that, it's vinegar. I put it on my chips," says Samson.

Science, maths, biology, geography and history (the Earl of Sandwich's card-table snack) have all cropped up. The subject of food relates to everything. And that kids should learn to cook seems so obvious. If ever an idea's time has come, this is the moment when children should be lured into the kitchen and taught about healthy food by cooking it themselves. But who is going to teach them? Schools don't and most parents can't - how many of us have the time, the skill or the patience to put up with the mess and squabbles? This is where The Kids' Cookery School comes in, as a way of inspiring children to prepare fresh food while simultaneously engaging in propaganda against food manufacturers and helping to defuse the obesity time bomb.

All through the summer holidays the west London school runs courses, with sessions lasting from an hour and a half (long enough to make pastry) to five hours. But KCS is not about turning out precocious dinner-party caterers - there are other children's cookery courses for that. The school term is its raison d'etre. Almost half the children who come during term time have moderate to severe learning difficulties or behavioural problems, and more than half the places are provided free or with financial assistance. KCS runs after-school clubs and classes for refugees, adults and children with disabilities - including wheelchair users. No child is excluded.

KCS is dedicated to teaching the children who need it most about something as fundamental as food. "It's crazy," says Fiona Hamilton-Fairley, the school's principal and founder, "that cooking is considered less important than swimming, singing or art. There is no class in school that tells pupils 'you are what you eat and drink' in a way that the message gets across. Cooking isn't just a skill that we need to survive, it's part of our lives." A child pipes up. "Do lemons grow in Jamaica? I've been to Jamaica."

Like most charities, KCS struggles each year to find the £200,000 it needs to keep going. The slightly more exclusive holiday courses help subsidise its exceptionally inclusive term-time programme. But, even in the holidays, assisted places are offered to children whose families can't afford the fees.

A lack of food education in homes and schools and the might of the food processing industry has had a catastrophic effect on the nation's eating habits and health. Salt, fat and additives in children's food are known to be bad for young bodies and behaviour, yet the furore about their prevalence has only just begun. When the House of Commons health committee published a report on child obesity in May, it was the latest in a long line of organisations to acknowledge that something needs to be done about the epidemic sweeping the nation.

Fiona Hamilton-Fairley saw it coming. "Ten years ago, when I started the school, I could have told everybody that the diet thing was going to happen," she says. Cordon-bleu trained and qualified to teach cookery to adults, her informal lessons for children at her home snowballed until she'd outgrown her kitchen. She believed that all children should be taught to cook ("making fresh food from scratch is a form of education"), but especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Seven years ago she set up The Kids' Cookery School as a charity, and three years later opened premises in Acton. With four cookers in colour-coded kitchens, two brilliant teachers and three other full-time staff, the project offers more than 2,000 children every year a taste and feel for fresh food.

"We are preventative medicine. We've probably already saved the government millions in dentists' and GPs' fees," says Hamilton-Fairley. "And this is an investment in the future of these kids and their diets." If this is medicinal, then doing what the spin doctors should have ordered years ago was never this much fun. Comments from the kids experimenting in the kitchen are highly entertaining. "I can't eat broccoli, I'm a Muslim." "Can I have a lot of cheese. A very lot." "The best thing about coming here is cooking food. Last time we cooked a pizza."

After the 10 and 11 year olds have left with their quips and their wraps and the kitchen's been swept, a party of six-year-olds arrives to make pasties with John Fernandez. They're from the same West London school, Berrymede, one of five local primary schools closely linked with KCS.

Trained as a chef and having worked in the competitive world of hotel restaurants, Fernandez joined KCS after leaving work to spend more time with his terminally ill grandmother. But the kitchen he works in now, and his approach to teaching cookery, couldn't be further from Gordon Ramsey's reality TV show, Hell's Kitchen. As long as the children are happy with what they've made, so is he. "You feel like you've achieved something because they're so pleased with what they've produced."

For these little ones ("my favourite age group," admits Fernandez), every stage of pasty-making is an adventure. Sifting the flour by tapping it through the sieve is an activity to be fought over. "I tapped more!" "No, I tapped more!" Fernandez adjudicates. "Everyone tapped the same." They each count three tablespoons of flour into their bowls. Two start, distractingly, counting to 100 while John shows them how to peel a carrot - one strip to be removed by each child. "Miss, Miss, Miss John? It could be magic. Can I smell it?", blurts out one child, confusing the teacher's gender in the excitement as the pasties come out of the oven. "Miss, I'm hungry," bleats another.

Hamilton-Fairley prefers to teach even younger children, "at three, four and five, before bad eating habits creep in," as a way of educating parents. These adults, most whom left school when cookery was still on the curriculum, may not know how to do more than programme a microwave. Parents don't like to be preached at, but their views can be affected by children coming home with a message about fresh food.

KCS is unique in this country but perhaps not for long. Its founder sees it as a pilot scheme. "My vision is to have one in every major city in Britain," says Hamilton-Fairley. By the end of this year she hopes to have identified at least one deprived area and started the process of establishing the next Kids' Cookery School. "Right now we're flavour of the month," she says with relief. Those in a position to influence what children eat should have the sense and good taste to keep it that way.

The Kids' Cookery School, 107 Gunnersbury Lane, London W3 (020-8992 8882; www.thekidscookeryschool.co.uk)