Want to cut your child’s higher education costs? Get them in the kitchen | Canada Voices

Food inflation has strained budgets in recent years, and hungry college and university students are feeling the crunch.

Groceries are 30 per cent more expensive today than they were five years ago – that’s an increase of 5.3 per cent a year, well above overall inflation of 3.6 per cent. Take-out and fast food have also been hit hard, with costs rising 27 per cent since 2021.

For students, the proliferation of food delivery apps has made ordering food online for delivery a bit too easy.

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A survey by DoorDash showed that 79 per cent of Gen Zs (ages 14 to 29) have ordered food delivery in the past six months. Alarmingly, it also found that 16 per cent of Gen Zs have done so three times in a single day.

Expensive food delivery has been normalized and it can inflate student costs by thousands of dollars a year.

Enter food literacy. Food literacy means having the knowledge, attitudes and skills needed to choose, prepare and enjoy food that supports your health. This goes beyond just knowing how to cook. It’s also about making decisions about what to eat, how to handle and store food safely, and how to budget and shop for groceries.

Here are four ways parents can help improve our kids’ food literacy before they leave home.

Know their preferred staples

Students need a list of food staples they like and that are good for them. It’s a building block for meals that will work for them. It’s much easier to find a recipe online with the keywords “chicken and rice” than it is by just Googling “dinner recipe for students,” which will yield thousands of results.

In our house, useful meal staples are chicken, eggs, pasta, rice, cheese, broccoli and peppers. You can make a handful of easy and tasty meals with these ingredients as a base.

Learn the basic kitchen skills

Food preparation skills, such as chopping with a sharp knife, using kitchen appliances, and choosing the right pots and pan might seem basic to adults, but if your kids have never done these things before, it’s unlikely they will start amid a slew of fall classes. So encourage them to get in the kitchen regularly while they are in high school so they get used to the tools of the trade.

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Cleaning up is a skill too

In our house, when the kids have cooked a meal for us, the parents clean up. But in real life, they will have to do both so make sure they’re getting practical skills like cleaning frying pans without removing the non-stick coating, safely cleaning the cutting board that was used for raw chicken and putting leftovers in the fridge in a timely manner.

Encourage them to get groceries

Having your little kids sit in the front of the cart at the grocery store exposes them to food shopping, but keep taking them as they grow older. Familiarity with the grocery store will help them zero in on what they need instead of wandering around aimlessly. Even if they are not cooking that night, give your older kids a shopping list and send them off to do the task for you.

Be smart with costs

Here is where financial literacy meets food literacy. Help your kids come up with a weekly or monthly food budget. A student who eats mostly food they prepared at home can expect to spend around $400 a month on groceries, depending on where they are living and what they like to eat.

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While they are unlikely to track their spending closely, having a budget will make them more conscious of the amount of money they are spending on food. They will quickly learn that certain foods are pricey and they won’t get enough to eat if they are dining on steak and salmon every night. Buying larger package sizes is usually cheaper, and they can learn to do some food prep to make bringing a lunch to school easier.

With many school-related costs out of your student’s control, what they eat is one area they can rein in costs. If you missed the boat for this fall, don’t worry – there’s always reading week and the winter break to give them a crash course.

Anita Bruinsma is a Toronto-based certified financial planner and parent of two teenage boys. You can find her at Clarity Personal Finance.