"Clean, separate, cook, and chill"

The Obama administration's new Food Safety website includes an alert widget for your blog, an RSS feed of food recalls (that doesn't yet appear completely operational), information about food storage, "ask the experts" contact information, and information sheets about various food-borne illnesses.

The federal government could have been using Web technology years ago to provide consumer information about the food supply, but I'll take what I can get. I don't think I'll put the widget on my blog, but I'll subscribe to the RSS feed of food recall alerts when they're available.

Putting all this stuff on a website is a wonderful idea. A lot of people aren't learning the basics of food preparation any more, and I think there are a few reasons. First, with all the focus on teaching to standardized tests and raising test scores, I think a lot of kids don't take a home economics class in school. Not that home ec was terribly useful when I was a teen, but at least we did learn our way around the kitchen, from prep to clean-up. Now I'm not sure how many schools still even offer a family and consumer science course. (My daughter's school doesn't.)

Second, take-home restaurant meals and convenience foods are more elaborate and cheaper than they were 20 years ago. When I was a kid, the take-out options were pizza, a Kentucky Fried Chicken family meal, or lousy Chinese food; the convenience food options were limited to TV dinners (remember salisbury steak?) and macaroni and cheese from a box. There's a lot more take-out to choose from now, and convenience food technology sometimes leaves me with that "wow, I'm living in the future" feeling when I look at some of the shelf-stable products in the supermarket.

Third, and this one's probably peculiar to myself, television cooking shows don't focus on the basics the way they used to. In the '70s and '80s I remember watching chefs like the Frugal Gourmet, or Jacques Pépin, or Graham Kerr (mostly after his Galloping Gourmet days), or Justin Wilson. And Julia Child reruns, too. These shows taught how to hold a knife, how to dice an onion, how to remember "hot pan, cold oil, food won't stick," how to dress a chicken, how to make pastry. The Food Network shows -- and most of the new shows on PBS, too -- don't teach. They're entertainment: tours of great American restaurants; foods of the world that are least recognizable to the Western palate; championship cook-offs with world-renowned chefs using the most expensive, most out-of-season ingredients available in desert Las Vegas. Alton Brown explains the chemistry and history behind a lot of foods, but the most recent show of his I watched showed how to make baklava from store-boughten phyllo dough, interspersed with actors dressed up as carpet-flying Persians and nomadic Turks and their camels. If Brown had spent that time teaching how to make flake pastry, it would have been more worth my while to watch the show. Instead, he explained how to make your own home-made rosewater. This is entertainment, not teaching; it's not in and of itself a bad thing, just different from what people my age grew up with.

Luckily, I have a Joy of Cooking at home with illustrated instructions.

I think you really lose something when you jump from box macaroni and cheese to celebrity chef shows, without stopping for a visit with Fannie Farmer and Cooking with Claudine in-between. Until cooking is as obsolete as spinning and weaving your own cloth (as a household necessity), it's a money-saving life skill that kids need to learn.

My point, and I do have one, is that a lot of kids are not only not learning how to make healthy food choices and cook the most basic of meals, but they are also not learning how to wash their hands before they cook, how to keep a sanitary kitchen, or how to even tell if the milk has gone bad. Putting up a website that takes the place of old-timey home ec classes is a welcome way to address that problem.