RadioScope Yummy Mummies- Woman's Hour BBC Radio 4, Thursday 31st January, 10am
Years ago at a conference in Limerick on the topic of poverty, a lady declared that if the poor learned to boil the outside leaves of cabbages as well as the inside ones, then their poverty would be very much reduced.
Her intervention did not get a very enthusiastic response. The rest of us in the audience were more interested in welfare reform than in boiling cabbages.
I sometimes think of her when I'm standing in a chipper and I see a kid who has been sent to buy fish and chips for the family dinner. The cost of that one meal would be enough to feed the family for a week if the parents knew how to cook.
As the lady in Limerick has no doubt noticed by now, there are parents today who wouldn't have the remotest idea what a cabbage was or what to do with it.
I would have thought cooking skills were so fundamental to survival that they would have been passed on from generation to generation but in too many cases this is not so.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many people lived in conditions so poor that they lacked the facilities even to teach the children how to cook. The children of homeless people living in bed and breakfast accommodation today will also never see a parent cook a meal while they are marooned in that bleak no man's land.
An attempt to reverse that loss of fundamental skills is underway in Britain where cookery lessons are to be compulsory for boys and girls aged 11 to 14. It would be wonderful to see such a measure introduced here.
What we need in our schools are proper cookery lessons, and not that agglomeration of bits and pieces called Domestic Science in which kids seem to learn how to cook inedible lasagne - for the first and last time - and not much else that's going to help in the kitchen.
So meagre is our teaching of cookery that we end up with young people - mainly young men - for whom ordering the delivery of a ready-cooked pizza represents the height of their culinary skills.
What a pity that schools cannot use that domestic science period to teach students to cook good, ordinary food - but now I fear I am turning into the lady from Limerick.
This Woman's Hour programme went to Manchester to look at a cookery project for mothers - hence the name Yummy Mummies. Some of the women were, as one put it, "starting from scratch". Another was amazed at how "really, really easy" cooking is.
By teaching these women how to cook, the project not only improves their health and that of their children but also helps them to make their money stretch further. And women from different cultural backgrounds teach other women how to cook their own traditional dishes such as curries.
Curries? All very well, but where's the cabbage?