Cooking: Why Bother?

In this day of fast food, microwave meals and food fusion restaurants, why should the average person bother with actually cooking their own food? There are many arguments for learning how to cook, including personal empowerment, expressing your creativity, health issues and cost. Food also seems to taste better when you have put your own effort into it.

Personal Empowerment

Being able to feed yourself is a crucial survival skill. When you let other people do all of your cooking, you are depriving yourself of being able to take care of yourself. When you learn the basics of cooking, you learn not only learn how to feed yourself, but also increase your self-confidence. You are not subject to a restaurant's opening hours, a large factory still making your favorite flavor or even on traffic patterns that might keep a delivery person from your door. You have the power to feed yourself without the cooperation of others.

Expressing Your Creativity

Everyone is artistic, whether they realize it or not. The human race seems to have a need in order to express itself in many ways through art. One of the best and most practical art forms in the world is cooking. Making a meal is a lot like making a painting - blobs of different colors in different shapes and textures come together to make up an entire painting. Cooking uses different tools, but the effect is the same.

Health Issues

You can't control what a company puts in their foods. You can add to it - but you can't subtract. Many processed and refrigerated foods are loaded with sugar, salt and fat that your body really doesn't need. When you do your own cooking, you control the amount of salt, sugar and fat that you consume. Making this adjustment to your diet can help ease or prevent many health conditions.

Cost

The best reason for learning the basics of cooking is that you will save yourself so much money! Going out to eat is a luxury - and a very expensive one. Not only do you have to factor in the cost of the meal, but the gratuity, the parking, the gas to get there and back and any applicable sales tax. You just pay for the food, cooking utensils and the stove when you do your own cooking. You can also pay for cook books, but you can also get free recipes off of the internet, from the newspaper, magazines and well-meaning relatives.