Abstract
Time allotted to training in a particular filed is naturally limited in the school-based education system. In an effort to impart the skills needed to use and manipulate a kitchen knife in most efficient manner, the author studied the school children who practiced slicing agar gel. When the act of slicing was taking place, control of the kitchen knife was influenced not so much by the height of the object being sliced as by its width. After kitchen knife had finished slicing and the object was examined, the prevailing factor appeared to be the height, not the width. In particular, when inexperienced kitchen knife-wielders were cutting items of greater width, the time taken between their raising the kitchen knife and making the final cut was considerably longer than the interval taken by more experienced subjects. Cooking classes at elementary schools have for many years used cucumber-and cabbage-slicing as practice of producing julienne a vegetables. When the slices were compared the results for the thinner cucumber were better than those for the more bulbous cabbage. However, an analysis of current elementary school fifth-graders taking cooking classes has shown that the degree of difficulty in producing julienne cucumbers and cabbages was relatively high; perhaps it would be a more positive step to introduce “coarse cutting” and “cutting at the end” for children in lower grades in preparing them for controlling and using kitchen knives.
