‘She’s making her SIX-YEAR-OLD BOY cook!? That’s sexist child abuse!’

Ridiculous, isn’t it? Yet that’s precisely the reaction an innocuous picture of young Lyle Paulu cooking his own supper caused when his mum Nikkole posted it on Facebook.

Perhaps it was Nikkole’s caption, which read, ‘I teach my son to cook & do household chores. Why? Because household work isn’t just for women’.

The image went viral, scoring 130,000 likes, yet became the unlikely recipe for yet another silly gender war. Globally, critics felt the mum was playing identity politics with her boy, saying she had ‘shamed’ Lyle to ‘make a politically correct point’.

When I Tweeted the picture with the caption, ‘Cute? Or early doors feminisation of boys for social media brownie points? You decide,’ I soon had Sophie Walker, the leader of the Women’s Equality Party on my case.

She said, ‘Are you saying that doing household chores is a female characteristic that hurts boys?’ The short answer I gave Sophie – ‘no’ – isn’t very entertaining, so here’s my more considered answer.

Let’s be clear: I 100% agree with the mum. Men – and boys – should be able to cook.

Few things depress me more than meeting a grown man who can’t look after himself. There’s something singularly pathetic about it.

I feel like weeping, ‘how did you make it this far in life? Did your parents do it all for you?’ Remember, lads, mummy’s boys are never sexy, unless their mummies taught them how to cook, like mine did.

When I was a boy, my mum was a home economics teacher. She’d be so bored of cooking all day at work, she’d say to me and my sister, ‘sort yourselves out tonight, or you’ll go hungry’. That soon did the trick. I decided to tool up, pronto.

Inspired by my mum, I was the only boy in my year who chose ‘Home Ec’, where I learned how to make tasty basics like macaroni cheese, lasagne and biscuits.

Lads teased me for being ‘gay’, which struck me as hilarious as I was spending two hours surrounded entirely by females, while they toiled in boy-only metalwork rooms. But the girls loved me for it and a penny dropped: years before Jamie Oliver became the Naked Chef or Joe Wicks smashed Instagram, I knew cooking makes a guy seriously popular with the ladies.

It made financial sense, too, when cash was tight. Cooking was cheaper than ready meals and when I went to uni I made a killing cooking for my culinarily challenged flatmates. I’d charge them £5 a meal for food that cost me no more than £2 a head and, living in a flat of eight, that was my drinking money sorted.

There’s an old Chinese proverb: ‘Give a man fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he’ll eat for life’. That’s why I’ve already taught my son, Sonny, 7, that cooking is boys’ work.

OK, some gender norms linger: he makes muffins and cakes with mummy and burgers and meatballs with daddy. But cut me some slack: there’s nothing wrong with growling while making meat patties.

‘Home Ec’ was dropped from British schools in 2014 as it was deemed unfashionably sexist. What a mistake. I think it’s time to bring it back, along with the money management the lessons also taught.

It’s not just poverty or gluttony that makes people reach for processed foods. It’s a lack of basic cooking skills, kitchen confidence and knowledge of what goes in to the food we eat.

Knowing how to cook prolongs life and increases health. We are in the midst of an obesity crisis. Sugar taxes and body shaming aren’t the answer: knowledge is power.

Cookery lessons at school should be made compulsory for everyone. Because cooking isn’t ‘women’s work’. It’s men’s work, too. The old cliché says: real men don’t eat quiche. Rubbish. Real men can make it. And do the washing up afterwards.

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