Taxpayers fund researchers to read cookbooks

nick cowen, 12 September 2007

One of Gordon Brown’s first moves as Prime Minister was to stir that alphabet soup of government departments. The DfES* was split up, a few bits of the DTI** got mixed in and we ended up with the DCSF*** and DIUS****. One might imagine this was little more than an excuse to get some fresh headed paper, stick a new logo on the departments’ biros and create some new junior ministerial posts to reward the government’s most outspoken parliamentary supporters.

Today’s news does little to dispel such a notion, as it emerges that researchers funded by DIUS have been spending their time reviewing the language in commercial cookbooks. Examining the difficulty of the language used in the recipes, they have noted approvingly that ‘Gordon Ramsay’s language is so easy to read that his cooking methods could be followed by a seven-year-old’ but criticises Nigella Lawson for using a ‘chatty’ writing style and long sentences that ‘5.3 million adults would not be able to understand’.
The only question this can possibly prompt is: why on earth was this research commissioned?
Paid for out of the higher education budget, does the public really need this implicit reminder that a hefty proportion of British people cannot read anything more than the most basic instructions? Are cookbooks about to become an essential element of a new equal opportunity policy where only recipe descriptions that everyone can understand will be allowed on the shelves? Perhaps the government wants to test out a bold new policy linking poor diet with semi-literacy and wants to conscript celebrity authors into providing new (statutory) guidance on how to eat. The imagination boggles.
Rather than complaining about the complexities of language in books that people choose to buy with their own money for reasons of their choosing, perhaps DIUS research should be aimed at discovering why so many adults cannot read to this standard. After all, one of their main objectives is supposedly to ‘tackle the skills gap amongst adults, particularly equipping people with basic literacy and numeracy.’ They aren’t going to achieve that by looking through recipe books.
*DfES = Department for Education and Skills
** DTI = Department for Trade and Industry
*** DCSF = Department for Children, Schools and Families
**** DIUS = Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills