Cookery, food and nutrition, home economics or domestic science - whatever you call it, many parents wonder where it's gone.

Learning about food and drink isn't a compulsory component of the National Curriculum but you may be surprised to realise how often 'food technology' as it's now known, turns up in the classroom.

A piece of cake!
During Key Stage 1, 5-to-7 yr-olds are taught to look at familiar things in an inquisitive way, working out how they're made and what makes them tick. Planning, choosing and using the proper equipment safely, and getting the right materials together may sound daunting but making fairy cakes fulfils all these Design & Technology requirements and more.

Alive, alive-o!
Turning milk into yoghurt demonstrates the way bacteria works for 7-to-11 yr-olds in Key Stage 2 Science, and leads on to important questions like why kill off the bacteria in the milk first, and what kind of thing useful bacteria eat. Finding out about healthy eating and a balanced diet is a key part of the life processes and living things element.

Schools encourage children to sort fruit and vegetables, bread and cereals, and cheese, meat and fish in to food groups. The physics of cookery encourages your child to use existing knowledge about which states are permanent (e.g. melted chocolate sets again but a fried egg stays cooked) to predict whether other changes can be reversed.

Using your loaf
In Key Stage 3 Design & Technology, 11-14 year-olds use their skills to design and make proper, working products - including food! The DfES website gives the example of a project about researching and designing a new kind of loaf, where pupils make bread using traditional ingredients, compare the results from a ready-made bread mix, and finally, after research into mass food production, plan a small batch production method.

Key Stage 3 scientists study the chemical reactions in cooking - like how does toast burn - and how these reactions affect materials and their properties. Many students investigate the energy values of food as part of learning scientific enquiry techniques.

Taking it further...
At Key Stage 4, 14-to-16 year-olds have the option to choose Domestic Science or Food and Nutrition as one of their non-compulsory GCSE topics. As to drink, the effects of alcohol on health are covered in PSHE but other than that there are some areas of teenage life where the National Curriculum fears to tread.

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