I Don't Understand Why You Can't Cook

(Amy and Emeril.)  You don't have to cook like these guys...just cook!



You know that trope we’ve heard our entire lives about how we aren’t taught basic life skills in high school?  We’re learning about the Teapot Dome Scandal and mitochondria, but we don’t know how to do our taxes, etc.?  I’m on board for a lot of that. (Although the notion that we don’t know how to ‘balance a checkbook’ is antiquated and simply isn’t true.  Balancing a checkbook takes all the math skills you learned by fifth grade. We just suck at it.)
             Why do so many of us not know how to cook?  I feel like it is something we should learn just after tying our shoes and just before geometric proofs.  It’s eating!  It’s the thing we all have to do every day to stay alive.  We breathe without conscious effort.  Check.  The biological urge to drink water seems to take care of itself.  Check.  But food preparation, the one that takes effort, escapes so many of us.  I don’t get it.
             First of all, let’s get this out of the way.  Cooking isn’t hard.  It isn’t.  Most of the time it doesn’t take a long time, and it can be done when you are doing other things.  Nutritionists will tell you that the simple fact you are cooking for yourself means you will end up eating healthier than if you ate your meals in restaurants or ate from the microwave every day. Now, I just made up that fact about nutritionists, but damn that seems plausible to me.   It’s minimal effort.  With actual food ingredients, fresh or not, you will eat better.  You’ll stretch your dollar further, too.
             One of the reasons we don’t cook for ourselves is that in this insane culture, cooking has a feminine connotation.  It’s something that moms do. Some men don’t want to associate themselves with feminine things, so they don’t cook.  Some women don’t want to associate themselves with domestic things, so they don’t cook.  Both of these views are categorically stupid. Why?  Because the notion that cooking is inherently male or female is ludicrous.  We all eat.  All of us.  My wife is a chef, and the restaurant business is still predominantly run by men.  How does that fit into all this? Women should cook for free and men should get paid for it?  What the hell does that mean? 
             Also, what you are saying to the rest of society when you don’t cook is this: “I have a basic need to eat every day and I expect all of you to take care of that for me.”  Fuck you, dude. If you can’t find the time and effort to lift up a spatula now and then to flip an egg, then maybe you shouldn’t be breathing, either.  What, are you too good for your own biological necessities?  I think that somewhere in the ideological divide we have in this country is self-reliance versus state support.  The balance is always shifting, and all our arguments seem to fall on one side or another.  I believe there is a giant pile of daily bullshit that the state can take care of that I don’t want to deal with in my life.  It creates jobs, keeps bridges from collapsing, keeps kids in school, etc.  But, if I had to make a conceit to satisfy the bootstrap pullers on the other side, I say that everyone learns to cook for themselves.  It’s a strong lesson in self-reliance and you understand a lot about finances, health, and how to participate in society along the way. Yes…can you imagine…not only cooking for yourself but making enough for others, too?  Whoa…
             It shouldn’t be a source of pride to not cook.  It shouldn’t be cute to admit you can’t boil water or that you eat Twizzlers for dinner.  Maybe it was at one time, but times are changing.  If you want to respect the environment, what’s a more personal way than what’s in your kitchen or what you feed your kids? You can show pride in your country with a dozen flags and a bunch of stickers on your truck, or maybe you can raise kids that know how to feed themselves? 
             It’s food!  You are going to eat some today!  Why don’t you want any part in that?

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