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Comment by ohjeez | Hacker News Reader

This really makes me happy.

When I was in Girl Scouts in the 1960s, we were taught to cook. I guess that was how they prepared us for our then-expected roles in life.

Even when I went to Girl Scout Camp (as I did from age 7 to 12), the outdoor skills we were encouraged to learn were watered-down versions of what boys learned. I canoed across lakes, where my husband canoed in wilderness areas on 10-day trips.

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Well, despite this being HN, I'd still argue that for most people, knowing how to cook is a more valuable skill to have than knowing how to pick a lock.

Probably, but there are plenty opportunities to learn to cook, but not many to learn lockpicking. Moreover, the argument “don’t teach skill X because skill Y is more useful on average” leads to silly consequences — it entails that you should never learn any advanced or obscure skills, which is absurd. Cooking is also more useful than programming, and yet you can make good money and have fun writing code. The point here is that learning is not exclusive, you can learn both to cook and to pick locks.

I think being a locksmith earns more than most cooks (although certainly less than high end chefs). Opening locks without keys is a big part of locksmithing.

What about high end chefs gender balance? One would argue the education shouldn’t stay in the way here.

I think they meant cooking as a life skill. Over a lifetime you'll save more money on eating out, if you know how to cook, than you would on locksmith services, if you know how to pick locks. Unless you're ridiculously careless with your keys and get locked out every week, I guess. Knowing how to cook will also keep you healthier and the value of good health is immeasurable.

>knowing how to cook

One Google query, two attempts and you know how to prepare a dish. It's not as difficult as most people think.

Some people would say the same thing about learning to code.

That doesn't mean it's true.

Coding is about thinking. It's difficult. Cooking is about repetition. It's much easier.

FWIW as a Boy Scout in the 80s we definitely learned to cook. There was no "merit badge" I'm aware of for cooking, but when we went camping we were expected to prepare 3 meals a day, mostly cooked. So in the mornings we might cook eggs and bacon. For lunch we usually did something relatively simple like heat up canned or cook dry mix soup. Dinners were on the spectrum everywhere from a hot dog on a stick to cooking steaks. We did various baking tasks such as making a solar stove to cook canned biscuits and the "foil packs" where you put veggies, potatoes, meat, and seasonings wrapped in foil into a fire to steam/cook them. I don't know what your cooking experience was like, and it sounds like from the other responses my experience might have been unique, but those things definitely laid a foundation and created confidence for future cooking tasks out of a cook book or something.

It's a merit badge now https://meritbadge.org/wiki/index.php/Cooking

And apparently has always been

> The Cooking merit badge was one of the original 57 merit badges issued by the Boy Scouts of America in 1911.

Why am I so angry that I didn't get the cooking merit badge? I learned to cook, damnit!

As a Boy Scout I am very envious of your cooking class. None of the scouting badges I earned have been very useful. Cooking on the other hand is something I could of used all my life and never really learned until I was in my 30s.

I think the most amount of cooking we did in Boy Scouts was making doughnuts on a trip to the cabin one time.

I made the BEST Apple Brown Betty when I was 8 years old.

Though my husband _did_ learn how to cook in Scouts. (It helped that he went through serious wilderness camping trips, so he knew how to do everything from gig a frog to roast a chicken... starting with a live chicken.)

Cooking merit badge is required for Eagle: https://meritbadge.org/wiki/index.php/Cooking. That link also says it was one of the original 57 merit badges, which I didn't know, but find interesting! I don't remember whether it was overly camp-cooking focused when I did it, but the current requirements include a "cooking at home" section.

Personally, what I have come to appreciate about the Boy Scouts merit badge system is breadth. None (or at least very few) of the merit badges require you to learn much about their topic, but they teach you a little, and introduce you to at least one person who knows some stuff about that thing. I feel that I learned a little bit about a lot, and my Computers merit badge instructor was one of the first computer "experts" I knew; he taught me how to wipe and install Windows 98, and was the first to show me the innards of a computer. I like to think (but don't really know) that lots of other folks stumble upon a passion in a similar way while working through the broad survey in the catalog.

I think it can be a bit hard for kids to find (or stated differently, for parents to provide) this sort of breadth, and I'm strongly in favor of any program that attempts to provide it, not just the boy / girl scouts.

I feel that camping taught me a lot about cooking; especially with backpacking; You learn what will keep, what's heavy, what ingredients you can replace with what, and what, with limited ingredients you can make into a good meal.

Examples: way too many combinations of sealed chicken/tuna, macaroni, and broccoli; eggs, pasta, using oil and water without/instead of milk, the food safeness of dried sausage.

It sounds like what I did at Boy Scout Camp in the 1990s more closely resembled your Girl Scout Camp experience 30 years prior.

Well, boy scouts were started as attempt to make boys more prepared for war time and based on army activities - to teach them being right kind of boy from that point of view.

No such motivation for girl scouts, more like attempt to make something proper feminine and still kind of similar.

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