Unprepared for the "Real World" - Food

As I've mentioned before, I think schools need to step up their game, especially when it comes to educating students about food and money.  I've touched on the money aspect before, so now it's time to discuss why food education is so important.  I think it's easiest to break this into three sections - cooking classes, nutrition, and school meals.

For me, home ec was a requirement for everybody in middle school, and I took an optional cooking class in high school.  All of these classes focused mainly on baking cookies, cakes, and other desserts and sweets.  Sure, it was fun (and delicious!) but I can guarantee you that if I didn't already know how to cook, these classes wouldn't have helped at all.  I understand it's hard to cook a meal from scratch in a short period of time, but I don't see why you can't find recipes that you can spread over a couple days.  Spend one day chopping up veggies and meat, store in the fridge overnight.  Next day, fry it up into a stir fry.  Explore veggies and different ways to cook them.  And not just potatoes.  This was huge for me.  I thought I hated brussels sprouts because I don't like how they taste (or smell) steamed.  Roasted brussels sprouts, however, have become one of my favorite veggies.

I was lucky to have parents who valued home cooked meals.  That isn't the case for everyone.  Some kids' parents don't know how to cook, or just don't want to take the time to.  While this is a separate problem, it makes it much harder for the kids to learn to cook and eat properly on their own.  You end up with generation after generation of people eating out for every meal who consider making a boxed meal "cooking."  While it's possible to make smart choices at restaurants, not everyone does.  It ends up being bad for you health and bad for your wallets.  With better planned cooking classes, schools could do their part to help break this cycle.

Then, nutrition.  There are people out there who think that the giant frappuccino they get daily at Starbucks has no calories "because it's coffee."  People get mad because they do a quick fad diet and lose weight, but then gain the weight back as soon as they quit the diet and go back to their usual eating habits.  Now, I can understand having trouble determining what's "healthy" and what isn't.  Human nutrition just isn't well understood, as evidenced by the constant flip-flops:  Eggs are bad!  No, eggs are good!  Saturated fat is bad!  No, trans fats are bad!  So on and so forth.

To be honest, I couldn't even tell you where I've learned the bit I know about nutrition.  Some of it was from health and science classes.  We learned about the food pyramid back in elementary school, but I don't know if anyone recommends that anymore.  Again, the lack of knowledge about nutrition is tough to fix because there's still so much we just don't know.  But we should at least be teaching our kids to make smarter choices.  Less processed food is better than super processed scary mush food.  Vegetables are good.  Whether you eat a high fat or low fat diet, fats are higher in calories than carbs and protein.  Just because something is lower in calories doesn't mean it's the healthier choice.  On that line, just because it's home cooked doesn't mean it's healthy.  I once counted the calories in a buffalo chicken calzone I made and almost cried.  Then I ate it.  It was delicious.

Teach kids about BMR and TDEE.  To gain weight, eat above your TDEE.  To lose weight, eat below your TDEE.  When you're at a weight you like, eat at your TDEE.  If your weight and/or activity level changes, so will your TDEE.  This doesn't seem like much, but when you feel like so much of your life is out of your control, just knowing you can control something as small as your weight can make a huge difference.

Last but not least, school lunches.  This is a hotly debated issue, at least according to some TED talks I've seen.  See the problem is, almost anyone can tell you that the stereotypical school lunch isn't that healthy.  Lots of prepackaged, overly processed, fried foods.  Schools will argue that it's all they can afford, and parents aren't willing to give schools more money, even if it's to feed their kids healthier food.  But again, what do we consider healthy?  Childhood obesity is skyrocketing, so we should make the lunches lower in calories, right?  Sounds good, until you consider kids below the poverty line, where a school lunch is often the only meal they are guaranteed.  Pump those school lunches full of nutrient dense, high calorie foods!

You can't just break kids into different lunch lines and say "you're too fat, here's a tiny lunch" and "you're too skinny/poor, here's a big lunch."  A compromise hurts both extremes, but works out fine for the average student.  But we want to help everyone, right?  I don't know how to handle the school lunch situation, but one obvious solution is to just pack your own lunch.  But this is also where nutrition education comes into play.  Kids will trade their lunch for lunch money.  Or just buy lunch as well and eat both lunches.  When you get to high school and can go off campus for lunch, it doesn't matter how healthy the school lunch is when there's a McDonald's across the street...

Ultimately, it all comes down to choice.  Teach kids to make smart choices.  Not everyone will, and there's only so much you can do about that.  It's hard to start cooking healthy meals from scratch when you grew up eating frozen meals everyday and that's all you know.  But given a solid foundation in cooking and nutrition in school, it'll be a lot easier.

Unprepared for the "Real World" - Money

I was lucky to grow up in an area with good schools.  I've always liked learning, and I had plenty of opportunities to learn new and exciting things.  Despite that, I find myself clueless out in the "real word" quite often.  Based on my experiences, there's a couple places where schools could make some huge improvements, two examples of which are education about food and money.  Maybe your schools did a better job teaching these than mine, or maybe the responsibility should be more on parents, but regardless of where the problem is, this is something that needs to be addressed.

Let's just focus on money today.  In my high school, we were only required to take a half semester of econ.  The class I took to meet this requirement had a project where we were assigned jobs and salaries, and had to make a budget based on that.  We learned to fill out a check.  We played the stock market game for a couple weeks.  Bam, econ requirement finished.  We never talked about how to make a good budget - this ended up being me blindly guessing at how much things like health care, utilities, and groceries would cost.  We never talked about how to invest in stocks in the real world, let alone the different ways to invest in stocks.  We never talked about how you save money for retirement.  Sure, there was the "try to save 10% of your salary," but where should you put that money?  And what about taxes?  Nothing.

I have a steady income now, so I should know something about money and what to do with it, but I don't.  I'd throw some extra money into my savings account every now and then, and the rest would just sit stockpiling in my checking account.  Saving for retirement?  Uh sure, that can be my savings account, but more likely I'll just need to work for the rest of my life just to get by.  Stocks?  Those are scary and only rich people buy them, right?

I don't expect schools to go crazy in depth with all of this, but why not even mention that there are different kinds of retirement accounts?  Not a word was said about IRAs, let alone Roth vs. traditional.  What about a pension or 401k?  Why not give a brief rundown of different types of accounts, and when they're relevant.  Why not explain that it's stupid to get a savings account that only give 0.05% APY?  I don't think that's too much material to handle.

And while you're at it, why not explain that picking individual stocks is really no different than gambling?  Or that mutual funds are not any better, except you're paying people to gamble for you?  But there are actually ways to invest in the stock market with relatively low risk, did you know?

What about a class period spent talking about credit cards and how to use them intelligently?  A day to discuss different types of student loans?

I've been trying to learn more about money and how to spend/save it responsibly in the past couple years, but this shouldn't be something you only start learning after you turn 22.  I'm still so uninformed about so many things, and each year I throw money around carelessly is a huge setback to my savings.  I spent years with that stupid 0.05% APY savings account and earned probably less than a dollar in interest total, yet I thought I was still ahead of the game because I at least had a savings account, and that's better than earning no interest in a checking account.

It would be fantastic if schools taught even a little bit about investments as part of the required curriculum.  But even if you're in my shoes, absolutely clueless about anything and everything money related, you can still do yourself a favor and learn about it independently.  Do your kids a favor, if/when you have them, and teach them about money.  I'm doing my best to learn, and I'll be talking more about my financial adventures in the future here.