Have you ever looked around you and thought that people seem to be cooking a lot less than they used to? Well, if you have thought that, you’re certainly onto something. According to the USDA, Americans spend an average of just 37 minutes a day preparing food, serving it, and cleaning up afterwards. That’s 37 minutes in total for all of the activities listed.
What this means, in practice, is that a truly breathtaking number of people are living their lives subsisting almost entirely on pre-prepared ready meals and processed snacks from the store, or else are ordering takeaway or eating at restaurants on a regular basis.
Increasingly, the same trend appears to be manifesting around the rest of the world.
There are many reasons why this is by no means a good thing, and why the return of cooking from scratch needs to return as a norm, as soon as possible. Here are a few of those reasons.
It’s a primal thing to do, almost like a meditation
Human beings have been cooking for at least as long as we’ve been human beings. A look at the biological makeup of humans — our relatively weak jaw muscles, combined with our enormous brains, that require a vast supply of energy — suggest that our species could only have got enough calories to survive, while living in the wild, through the incredible technology of cooking.
Cooking is truly ancient and primal, from meals roasted around the bonfire, to the modern kitchen.
When cooking you breathe in the smell of the food, the aroma of the butcher block oil from https://www.realmilkpaint.com/butcher-block/, you feel the fresh dough under your fingers, or wince at the sting in your eyes from cutting onions.
The experience of cooking, in and of itself, can be very meditative, and can help to reconnect you to the more essential rhythms of life.
It’s far better for your health to cook from scratch
The bane of the modern culinary world is processed foods; a category that can include everything from the loaves of bread you find in your local supermarket, to breakfast cereals, gourmet “ready meals”, cans of sugary soft drink, and chocolate bars.
When food is processed, many dubious additives are added, and many vital components are likely to be left out, or included in the wrong dosages.
One of the starkest examples of this is that research repeatedly shows that eating fructose-rich fruit helps to fight obesity, while eating high fructose corn syrup is directly linked to obesity.
Reclaim control of your health, and begin cooking from scratch.
Tasty food is one of life’s simple pleasures that everyone can enjoy
Everyone enjoys eating tasty food. In fact, it’s probably not too much of a stretch to suggest that a tasty meal is one of life’s great pleasures.
The thing is, if you don’t make the effort to cook, and to expand your cooking skills, you will only ever be able to enjoy tasty food at someone else’s dinner table, metaphorically in terms of processed foods, and literally, in terms of friends and family.
Learn to cook well, reintroduce delicious food to your life as a regular treat, and make the lives of the people around you better by means of this humble but seriously meaningful talent.
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