I NEVER thought I'd say this, but I've got a lot to thank my cookery teacher for.

We were never exactly close after an unfortunate incident in which I accidentally destroyed her favourite sewing machine.

Our strained relationship was damaged beyond repair when I tried to whip up a school rebellion on the grounds that making girls do home economics was fundamentally sexist.

Miss Home Economics was a forthright woman, and she could hold a class entranced with her candid opinions about my feeble drop scones and my soggy lemon meringue pie.

I became emotionally scarred, and eventually even mathematics lessons passed too quickly when what followed was a double session of trying not to break anything in a room full of glassware, crockery and delicate machinery.

Nevertheless, I owe both Miss Home Economics and my Mum a debt of gratitude that I managed to leave home for student life, capable of slightly more than boiling an egg.

It's true that my college diet owed much to the Goblin steak and kidney pudding (boiled and eaten without any of those messy, dirty vegetables) and to Ambrosia Devon Custard (eaten cold, straight from the tin).

But my shepherd's pie was a legend for all the right reasons, and by the time I started work I had overcome my mistrust of 'foreign muck' to the point where I could rustle up those twin badges of studenthood, a spag bol and a chilli con carne. Even if the beans for the chilli were Heinz.

I little dreamed this puny culinary record would ever entitle me to claim any kind of high ground, but this week I learn there is a generation out there who are yet more cack-handed than my student self.

Take 21-year-old Zara, a student at London University, who reportedly doesn't have a single saucepan in her kitchen.

What's more, she owns not one kitchen utensil, and all her cutlery is plastic. She eats take-away pizzas, cup-a-soups and ready meals that she can stick straight in the microwave.

Zara was used by a newspaper to illustrate a new survey which suggests she is far from unusual.

The study by the Guide Association (motto: Be Prepared) claimed only a minority of schoolchildren are taught home economics nowadays, and that only four out of ten British schoolgirls have ever cooked a meal. It is not recorded whether any of today's schoolboys can cook. Are they in for a shock if they think they won't have to!

The culprit, as ever, is modern education, which, it is said, dwells too much on food technology (in other words, the science bit), and not enough on the humble practicalities of learning to cook.

May I suggest a solution? Instead of churning out 25 million of those cheerful 'Protect and Survive'-style leaflets on how to manage when terrorists strike, perhaps the Government could get Delia Smith's permission to run off some of the easiest recipes from her How To Cook series.

It may not stop us all from being vaporised or infected by some new and invincible biological agent.

But it may save untold numbers from being inadvertently poisoned as a nation tries to teach itself to put a home-made meal on the table once more.

Updated: 11:13 Wednesday, July 28, 2004