Knowing what foods are healthy doesn’t help you if you don’t know how to cook them. We can’t rely on telling people not to eat the easy options when they don’t know how to cook the healthy options. We need to start teaching these skills to children.
In Japan, elementary-school-aged children collectively prepare lunch for the class each day using fresh ingredients. They are taught not only healthy options, they learn how to prepare, cook, and clean up after the meal, and they learn all the jobs in each step of the process.
Unfortunately, we haven’t designed our schools with this in mind. So first off, new schools could be incentivized to build elementary schools that allow for students to learn this skill on a daily basis.
For the many schools in the US that were not designed in a way that would make this possible on a daily basis for every class from an infrastructure standpoint, there are options.
Rotational schedules could be developed to make this possible one day a week, with different groups of classes preparing even just a portion of lunch, even if only a side dish, each day.
This will not take jobs away from existing workers, and in fact it would require hiring more workers to teach the students these skills.
Alternatively, home economics style courses could be reintroduced, but at the elementary age to instill these skills early via that route.
It is not enough to tell already overweight, metabolically ill adults how to eat healthy, even though we need to do that. It’s not enough to simply tell children to avoid all the easy, unhealthy options without arming them with the knowledge and skills needed to make the healthy choices. We have suffered decades of misinformation and destruction of the family units that are ideally supposed to pass on this kind of knowledge.