Fun and life lessons in the lunch box

To learn to cook is to gain a life skill and get a hands-on lesson in science, history and living well

- Avantika Bhuyan

There is a line in Jolly LLB 3 (2025) about the urgent need for children to study agricultural systems, otherwise they would assume that food comes straight from online apps and not farmlands. I remember chuckling at this scene in the theatre—it seemed a tad hyperbolic. Until I watched a group of 11 and 12-year-olds enact Shark Tank-like pitches at a social gathering recently. One set had an idea for a tea-related startup, as part of which they wanted to cultivate plantations in the heart of Haryana.

I am pretty sure hundreds of tea plants in the hills somewhere self-combusted into dust at the very thought of being shifted to hot plains. While some future tech might make this possible, at this point of time, all I can think about is the disconnect between urban childhood and food systems.

Cooking is still not seen as a life skill by parents and kids but as a hobby—a flex at birthday parties, something to pepper conversations with. "My son uses only imported flour for pasta", "my daughter only cooks with matcha", so on and so forth. This is still a leap from a few years ago, when parents would proudly claim that their kids didn't even know how to boil an egg. The idea was to show off a battery of cooks in the kitchen so that the family didn't need to get its hands messy.

Today, its encouraging to see children embrace the joy of transforming ingredients into dishes that offer both sustenance and taste. But there is more to food than that—each ingredient carries stories of tradition, skill, sustainability, provenance and the resilience of people who grow them. Different scientific concepts come into play every time you cook. History, geography, sociology, chemistry, biology—all of these disciplines come together in the kitchen.