The skills needed to make healthy, inexpensive meals from basic ingredients in past generations used to be passed down from mother to daughter. However, the ready availability of convenience foods and takeaways has distracted many people from meal-making. Kitchen-crafted dishes from healthy ingredients have in many cases been replaced by factory-produced concoctions high in salt and sugar. Cooking skills have been lost.

The result is a younger generation with a tendency to be overweight through consuming the wrong sort of meals and often with no-one at home to teach it any better way of doing things.

Yet, ironically, this is a time when there is more and more interest in TV programmes about cookery and, thanks to the example set by celebrity chefs, as many men as women are spending time in the domestic kitchen.

The time is right to build on this renewed fascination with food and make sure it's taken up by the next generation, both boys and girls. The Government proposal to make cookery lessons compulsory for all pupils in secondary schools is a sound one. As Roger Sheard, operations manager of Bradford's in-house school meals provider, says, food technology is fine in its way, but it doesn't teach pupils the essential life skills of how to shop for, prepare and cook nutritious, healthy food from fresh, seasonal ingredients.

These cookery skills are likely to be increasingly important in a world in which food seems set to become more expensive for everyone. The first, and perhaps most important, lesson to be taught is that home-made, do-it-yourself food is not only better for you - it can also be cheaper.