Home ec grows up

Forget baking cookies and sewing skirts. Today's home economists have turned their attention from caring for the family to tackling community issues such as poverty, obesity and food safety

Welcome to the new world of home economics. Baking cakes and sewing pillowcases are out; reducing childhood obesity and developing community-based solutions to poverty are in.

Ms. Rudd graduated from the University of Alberta last spring and now works for Vibrant Communities Edmonton, where she's run a variety of projects from financial literacy classes for teens to a tax-preparation program for low-income workers. "I absolutely fell in love with it," Ms. Rudd says. "It was aligning with what I believed in life."

While many university-level home economics programs have disappeared in recent decades, cast aside as relics from the 1950s, the programs that did survive are thriving under various new names. In Canada, it's called human ecology; in the United States, it's now family and consumer sciences. Both name changes happened in the 1990s.

LINK: TorStar