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If they are to have any chance of success, new nutrition ideas need fresh ways of cooking, costing, buying and storing. This new series of articles, by Irene Finch, links nutrition, food technology and educational psychology to help home economists and others who are innovating. In the first article she summarises the dietary modifications generally recommended and relates these to flour cookery, the most difficult area for new inventions.

This is the fourth aspect of teaching nutrition to be discussed by Irene Finch BSc, MAEd. In previous issues she has explained her simple meal choosing system and the importance of conviction and evidence, experience and information

Being low in fat and cholesterol free, yet contaiing valuable amounts of protein and dietary fibre, the pulses are an important group of foods which rate well by today's dietary standards. But how many people appreciate their value, know about the different kinds of pulses available and some of the most appetising ways of serving them? Irene Finch MA, BEd tells us more about these versatile foods

Nutritionists work out the nutrient and fibre content of each food but most people need a quick and simple system for everyday meal planning. With a good system, children who know very little ‘real’ nutrition can still produce nutritionally sound meals, at least if they also broadly follow the standard eating patterns of our culture.

It has been suggested that there are two aspects to nutrition teaching, information and motivation, and that while we are succeeding at present with one, we are failing with the other. But there are also indications that teaching of information could be improved. Surveys show that general nutrition understanding is poor and that nutrition ideas carry little conviction: they may be ‘brought out on Sundays’, but are not really much used by housewives unless they coincide with folk ideas such as those setting a high value on meat or milk.

We now have three good reasons for stressing the use of dark green leafy vegetables (dgv for short):

Holland has an official Nutrition Education Department with a staff of nutritionists and an enviable output of materials. They have come to realise that their former food group system was not well accepted by the public, was not a good basis on which to build dietary goals, and above all, was only an invented system, open to modification if it did not work well. They say it was not easy at first to look, in this light, at the food groups they ‘grew up with’.

Problem flour Goods. Lowfibre recipes full of fat and sugar could of course be eaten in small amounts by exercising will power, or indeed between slices of wholemeal bread to provide the extra cereal we need. But most people will find it worth while to look at the healthier recipes discussed below. These foods are difficult to classify because they overlap, but a helpful bakers' classification will be used and explained below.

We are trying to get out of old ways of teaching nutrition that cause harm, but one old way is dogging our footsteps. That is the idea of some old cookery writers that vegetarians must be made to look the same as the rest of us, and that vegetarians have problems in getting enough protein, so they must eat lentil roast made to look like a joint and nut cutlets made to look like a chop with macaroni for a bone.

Some flour recipes clearly help our nutrition aims or can easily be modified to do so. They are the main subject of this article, in which some useful flour cookery principles are introduced step by step. Many terms in flour cookery have such variable meanings that they can cause confusion, for example, drop scones, short, germ and cell, so I have tried for an unambiguous terminology.