Fat Tax So we're to have a fat tax, in an effort to combat the scourge of obesity that is sweeping the nation the government proposes to add a tax to sources of dietary saturated fat. Great idea, we all know that nobody smokes anymore since the tax on a packet of fags went through the roof, and hardly anybody drives a car now that petrol and road tax is so high. So what should the government be doing ? Well I'm afraid it's all down to education, if you have a generation of children leaving school who can't tell a leek from a lemon, can't make bread, can't tell one cut of meat from another and therefore will never enter a butchers, can't buy, fillet and cook a fish, well, you get the idea. I know there are already a thousand other demands on teachers time but two subjects that have suffered more than any other under present and past governments are physical education, and home economics. Even when I was at school, some 20 odd years ago, we did regular PE, and all the way through 1st and middle school we had cookery lessons, granted it was mostly baking, but along the way we learned to make bread, pizza base, lasagne, casserole. When my mother was a home economics teacher she taught the full gamut of the subject, purchasing, costing, dietary values of food, how to shop in a butchers, greengrocers and fishmongers. Some of us living in comfortable UWC/Middle class households with parents that were good cooks may thing this comes automatically outside school but that isn't so in many households in the UK today. Young parents who never learned to cook at school, or from their parents, now can make nothing more complicated than a ready meal or pot noodle. Cookery is not hard, but it needs to be taught. I've got a new commis chef at the moment, he has come to me with a fairly blank idea of the subject, but he is keen. Three weeks ago he could make almost nothing bar a fry up, now he makes perfect bechemel, veloute, soups of all kinds, risotto, sauces and I'm opening his eyes to a variety of flavour and ingredient combinations that he wouldn't have dreamed of last month. Teach children good basic cookery, if they learn soups and sauces they will be able to feed themselves and endless variety of nourishing, healthy, inexpensive food for evermore. Teach them about cooking from scratch, potatoes and vegetables, stocks and stews, when to grill, roast or casserole meat. Taxation won't work, it will just raise some more money for the government to burn in NHS bureaucracy, MP's wage packets and endless layers of civil servants.