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A British girl in 1960 left school able to roast a joint, render the dripping, make a suet crust and bone a fish. Her granddaughter was taught to design the box a pizza comes in. It was called domestic science, and it was on the timetable from the 1870s. Once a week you carried your ingredients in on the bus in a wicker basket with a tea towel over the top. A woman in a white overall, who frightened everybody, taught you the lot. - How to choose a cheap cut and make it tender - How to make stock from the bones - How to use up the cold joint on Monday - How to feed a family of 5 for a week on a wage The boys were next door doing woodwork, and went home to be fed by someone who had passed the course. In 1990 the National Curriculum abolished it. Cooking was folded into a new subject called design and technology, alongside plastics and electronics. Pupils no longer cooked a meal. They "developed a food product". They surveyed their classmates on preferred toppings, drew the packaging, and wrote an evaluation. Thousands of school kitchens were stripped out, since nobody needed an oven to draw a box. That was 36 years ago. The first children through it are now the parents, standing in a supermarket with no idea what to do with a shoulder of lamb, and being told that their weight is a failure of willpower. It was a decision. A country that had taught every girl to turn a carcass into a week of dinners chose to teach her children to be customers.