Home Cooking is the Thing

Musing Outloud for STSC Symposium: Leisure

Home cooking is the thing. If there is one place in your life to orient yourself around, to find a stable, robust foundation for anything else in your life you want to take action and do, home cooking is an incredibly strong starting place.

If you can sort out your life so that you have the time and capacity for home cooking, you have a solid, sorted life.

If you need to sort out your life so that you can find the time and capacity for the things you want to do, home cooking is a great place to start sorting.

It’s the center and the result. It’s the process and the endgame.

Home cooking is the thing.

Personal Finance

Savings is where this conversation usually starts. “Want to save money? Cook your own meals.” Bring leftovers to work. Batch cook for easy meals. Buy in bulk.

I’m something of a recovering personal finance addict. If you want to save more money and you want more control over your budget, home cooking is the thing.

It’s probably the area where you have the most potential savings between what you currently spend and what is possible to save. If you just want to save a little bit of money to help pay off a vacation debt you loaded on your credit card, you cook more and go to less restaurants. If your grocery bill is overwhelming, you have many levers to reduce it by buying more basic ingredients or bulk. If you want full /r/frugal financial minimalism or are in some sort of budget crisis, you can load up on lentils and vegetables and ride a surprisingly long-range money booster while you get your other shit together.

Each dollar you save per meal is $1095 you save per year, if we stick to three meals a day. It’s very easy to save a dollar per meal, still easy to save $2, somewhat easy to save $3. You can fill an IRA’s yearly limit from grocery savings alone.

However, the penny pinching side of home cooking can be totally discarded, and home cooking is still the personal finance thing.

Once you are no longer living paycheck-to-paycheck, checking your bank accounts every week, and making hard decisions between things nice things like running the heat and paying the Internet bill; once you’re at the point where you can drop a $20 bill on a few nice things without fretting about going bankrupt; once you are making dependable living wages: home cooking is where you not only enjoy the steak and lobster, but you can either do it at a budget at home or afford to go out and do it with friends because the rest of the time you eat home cooking.

Restaurant cooking keeps you abstracted, in some sense, from the costs of the food that you’re consuming. Obviously it’s more expensive, because you’re paying for service and the restaurant’s expenses on top of the ingredients. But more than that simple math, it’s harder to check in with what you’re actually spending on a meal-per-meal basis in such a way that you lose track of how much you spend on yourself.

When you hold a grocery receipt, you get a little bookmark on what you’re doing to take care of yourself, whether toward the “saving money and getting my financial shit together” direction or toward the “splurging on the fresh salmon and nice ice cream because damn it, I deserve it!” direction, or some hybrid of both. You have far more agency over these decisions when you cook for your family and yourself, and a greater relationship to what you’re spending in money, time, and energy doing it.

On the flip side, the “convenience” of dining out isn’t very convenient, not really. More on that below.

Health

If you want a better relationship to your own health and nutrition, home cooking is the thing.

The health accounting of home cooking operates along several axes: freshness, non-processed, and portion control.

The predominant health lever is portion control: restaurants, especially in the United States, easily deliver twice as large portions as a person should eat. Even fast food “supersizing” usually places food outside the scale it needs to be for satiation. This is most readily noticeable in meats. The reason why a quarter pounder is a standard size for a burger is because a quarter pound is an elegant measure that also happens to be a tad larger than a generous portion of meat.

“Tad larger?” some carnophiles, with their favorite double-cheeseburger joints and appreciation for a torso-sized slab of sizzling steak, ask. A single quarter pounder patty is rarely the amount of meat served at any sort of restaurant or drive-thru. I would imagine if the various cuisine services across the US switched to an actual single portion of meat, the cries of “Shrinkflation!” would only be outdone by the sound of rioters tearing chain restaurant HQs to the ground.

But anyway, in case you’re wondering, look at the palm of your hand. That’s the size of a single portion of meat.

Now, I’m not here to tell everyone that they need to start reducing the amount of meat they eat. It’s advised by health sciency nutritionist whatever types, but I eat a bit more meat than I should myself; people from rich countries tend to, on average, and you can trace a countries’ wealth by how much more meat the average citizen consumes.

No, what I’m saying here is that rules-of-thumb like “the palm of your hand is a serving of meat” actually become quick and instinctual as you learn what portions you actually do crave and desire from food. This is entirely up to you! You can decide to lose weight, and so eat less food overall as well as more nutrient-dense food. You can eat more meat if you’d like, and it’ll be cheaper and fresher than a restaurant. If your doctor sez you need to cut the salt intake, you can just cook with less salt rather than try to communicate your weird new diet to a frustrated waiter or figure out which foods are safe to order. Cholesterol-free is easy when food is not fried. You just pivot and adjust whatever you want, whenever you want, for whatever reason.

You can substitute whatever for whatever. My wife is mildly lactose intolerant, so we switched to almond milk. My mother doesn’t like almond milk, so we buy milk when she arrives. You need a high satiety snack, get some unsalted peanuts. You want quick vegetables, you can get canned, but if you want to cut the processed foods out, you can get fresh vegetables and fry them. Want to cut the oil?, you can steam them. Want to cut the time?, you can boil them. Want their maximum freshness?, eat them raw.

It’s all your choice. You can eat as healthy or as unhealthy as you want, but on average you’ll likely be eating healthier than the sum of out-of-home dining, and even if you’re frying everything in sight, you’re at least saving money doing it. It’s all upward. Everything is better. Home cooking is the thing.

But if health matters to you, freshness is the thing. Relatively speaking, the order of operations of nutritiousness are ultraprocessed —> canned —> frozen —> just-in-time fresh —> ripe fresh —> organic fresh food.

Ultraprocessed foods are things like frozen dinners, mac&cheese, cured meats, anything pre-packaged that you heat up and it’s already ready, or anything that comes boxed with with dayglo-colored powders. Processed foods have all sorts of dyes and preservatives and nitrates and so on that slowly poison you.¹

In other words they’re about as healthy as fast food, albeit sometimes a little cheaper and come with less packaging. The health advantage is mostly portion control.

Canned (and jarred) food is processed food, but has more health potential because sometimes it preserves otherwise necessary nutrients from vegetables and such. Canning was truly a revolution in bringing nutrition to people in the most remote areas of the world until the advent of freezing.

Frozen food is better than canned food because it’s less processed and sometimes unprocessed. Frozen food technically never goes bad, but freezer burn tends to dry out and destroy much of the nutrients of food, particularly vegetables. Thus, frozen food is basically just ‘less fresh’, in both the sense that it literally tastes less, and in the sense that it doesn’t offer the nutrients of fresh.

Fresh food is, you know, the real stuff. Just-in-time fresh food is stuff like fruits and vegetables picked before they are ripe so that they ripen by the time they land at the store, or even until after they’re purchased and you ripen them at home yourself. Being not ripe, they don’t offer the nutrient advantage of ripe fresh food.

The problem with ripe fresh food is that it expires too quickly to be cheap to maintain. It either has to be frozen or processed to be preserved, or sold and eaten immediately. So genuinely fresh food tends to sell at a premium and is usually a localvorish concern — you have to buy locally, like at a farmer’s market or similar.

Organic is both just-in-time food and ripe fresh food that is ostensibly produced without things like pesticides and industrial fertilizers. There’s no official and technical certification for organic food, though there are some cooperatives and companies that have their own markings and labels to identify it. Your mileage may vary and organic requires some skepticism and research.

Another thing you’ll notice as you climb this spectrum from ultraprocessed to organic fresh food is that each step of the way has far less packaging, and far less plastic packaging. Hold on to that note, it’ll become important later.

So I’m completely pulling these numbers out of my ass, but you can see the hierarchy of health and budget of home cooking as being built around their dynamic levels of cost, nutrients, and poison:

I could probably try to read some research papers or run some studies or something to back up these assertions, but I’m actually pretty dedicated to keeping this whole essay folksy and rule-of-thumb. Whereas “33% nutrients” and “50% poison” may sound alarming, that’s more in comparison to some ideal amount of maximum nutrient / minimum poison alignment you want in your body per item, to generally make the following point:

The more fresh and ripe your food, the more nutritious it is, the less poison it has, and the more expensive it is. Poison in this case can be from processing, to packaging, to pesticides.

As you go up the ladder, the costs rise faster than the nutritional value or the drop-off in poison. The leap from ultraprocessed food to just-in-time food is major: your budget may double but you are FAR healthier and less poisoned. The leap from just-in-time to organic is not so clear. I personally consider quite a lot of “organic” stuff to be consensual inflation. You’re choosing to pay a LOT more for minimal increases in nutrition and decreases in poison.

BUT, you are paying for increases in nutrition and decreases in poison, and to the organic folks’ point, having the diversity of choice in the supermarket means sometimes when chicken flu breaks out, organic free range brown eggs actually become cheaper than the factory farmed thin-shelled white stuff.

A very quick way I like to say this is, “Humanity strikes a cost balance between pesticide or pestilence.” At any rate we’re all on the same team here: everyone wants to feed their family, nobody wants to experience a famine.

A pot of red beans that soaked overnight

On that note:

Ecology and environmental concerns

Waste reduction. Waste reduction waste reduction waste reduction. Waste reduction. Home cooking is the thing.

Any restaurant creates more waste per day than the amount of waste that would be generated by all of their customers eating at home.

But also your own wastebaskets get less full the fresher and better you eat. The more fresh the food, the less plastic, styrofoam, paper, boxes, aluminum, and glass it comes in. Within the packaged foods you’ll find the same dynamic: dry beans and rice come in nicely reusable or recyclable bags, whereas canned beans are in metal containers that must be washed out before recycled and are much heavier. Loose vegetables keep longer than plastic-wrapped vegetables.

And when you systematically stock up and cook from longer-lasting, less-packaged stuff, you throw out less food overall from your fridge, and thus waste less of your food budget. And when you get a sense of your own portion control and appetite, you start to buy the right things in the right quantities and over time throw out less stuff, as well as adapt and learn new ways of cooking similar ingredients to expand your palate.

And, the better you engage in portion control, the less the carbon impact and energy required in producing and shipping the food you consume (consuming = eat + throw away). This is both true along quantity and quality metrics. Waste less, spend less, use less resources; but also when you eat fresher, more vegetable food matter, it comes from closer geographies and uses less land and sea.

The global meat industry alone accounts for far more carbon emissions than global transportation. This post is not trying to convert you to vegetarianism, but I will say that ground beef from a local butcher is going to be fresher and tastier than frozen burger patties from Tyson foods and those benefits magically also reduce a ton of carbon emissions in the overall environment. The issue is that local butcher’s meat costs more, and so there we are. It’s up to you.

Whatever your personal beliefs on the matter, the theme still holds: home cooking is the thing. If environmentalism is your thing, home cooking is a heck of a starting point.

Chores and Maintenance

One drawback of home cooking is that it’s messy. It creates the regular Sisyphean curse of dishes to wash, and builds up messes in the kitchen and dining room². Some messes sneak up on you: at first you have a perfectly good range great for cooking anything, and then next thing you know, you’re firing up an open flame over several layers of crackled grease.

It’s the labor of cooking and cleaning that takes people out of the home cooking game most, in favor of the convenience of take-out and restaurant dining.

However: whether you cook or not, you eventually have to clean your abode. Your skin is shedding all these dead cells all over the place, you’re tracking dirt in from the outside,³ your stuff gets disorganized and in disarray.

Ultimately you need to clean. The special thing about home cooking is it makes you more aware of it. Home cooking is the thing.

You can’t start cooking if the dishes you need to cook are dirty. So even if you’re a leave-the-dishes-til-tomorrow type, if you get into a pattern of home cooking, you get into a pattern of doing the dishes. And if you get into the pattern of doing the dishes, you get in the pattern of having soap and hot water and a rag or sponge or paper towels on hand to wipe things off. And if you get into the habit of wiping things off on the regular then you’re pretty much just a refrigerator chart away from having your home cleaning chores sorted out.

I don’t even have a home chore chart, but whenever I go back to dedicated, regular home cooking, I notice that my mental attention of how to keep up with the cleaning measurably improves. It’s when my wife and I fall back into a pattern of takeaway or dining out that the apartment falls apart.

Despite the fact that technically home cooking should mean we create more messes and thus have a messier apartment, when food outside the house would be disposed and cleaned up by the restaurant, it turns out not to be true in practice.

Here raises a chicken-or-egg issue though: is the house cleaner because we’re cooking at home more, or are both a cleaner house and home cooking the result of having more time and capacity to be home?

Time and leisure

Now we’re starting to bite into something deeper than petty mathematics of pennies saved, waste products reduced, and nutrients attained. Now we’re starting to confront the question of what those pennies and nutrients are for.

And here’s where I restate the program in a more metaphysical way: home cooking is the thing.

Let’s just start say: in order for home cooking to be the thing, one must have a home.

A home is two things: a domicile, and your social rooting.

So, there are times in people’s lives when either of these things can be lacking. In those cases it would seem like a post about “You should do more home-cooking!” can come across as condescending, because you don’t have a home with which to cook. You might be literally lacking housing or you lack the capacity to do it in a meaningful social sense. You literally don’t have the time, because you’re overworked and underpaid; or your housing doesn’t have a kitchen, like a dorm or an SRO or a shelter; your health isn’t up to it. Here in New York it needn’t even be that deep: there are food deserts and tiny apartments such that a supermarket isn’t even within traveling distance and even if it was, some residents don’t have a range in a safely-ventilated area.

Red beans with minced garlic, salt, cayenne pepper and cilantro before the water is added to the slow cooker.

So a ton of assumptions about your life situation is placed in the idea of “home cooking is the thing.” But in that sense, “home cooking is the thing” isn’t advising a thing you should do but acknowledging that having the capacity and time to do it is a goal everyone should have, even if they don’t particularly want to cook.

Reworded: it’s better to have the kitchen and the time to cook and not do it, then it is to lack the kitchen and the time to cook even if you don’t like cooking. The types of behaviors and sensibilities that get you a kitchen and the time to cook are usually the type of behaviors and sensibilities that make home cooking desireable and great.

Home cooking is the American dream.

This also opens up the issue of the other extreme: the sort of people who have all the housing, time, family, and resources they need, and still don’t have the capacity to cook at home, because they’re too busy grinding or busying themselves with other things.

And for those people, home cooking is the spiritual thing. If you’re too busy in your life you can’t step away from the grind long enough to set a potato to bake and cover it with sour cream and chopped chives⁴, if you have to pay someone else to do it, you’re not living as high a life as you think you are. You may be rich, but your spirit is poor.

If you don’t like cooking because it gets in the way of leisure, then you need more leisure time to do the other things you want to do and cook.

The whole damn point of living a good life is leisure time. We do things so that we can enjoy the life we’re living. Home cooking is only a chore if and only if you don’t have the leisure time to support it. When you know how to get the most from your leisure, home cooking becomes central to it.

Craft and thinking time

An unsurmountable contrary point is that some people just don’t like cooking.

Sucks to be them.

Flippancy aside, it’s highly recommended people who really don’t like cooking partner with people who really do like cooking. And while the person who enjoys cooking does the cooking, the partner not doing the cooking expends the time in some other home-centric multiplier of leisure. A very obvious compromise is that the person who doesn’t cook does the dishes.

Furthermore, I guesstimate that of any group of people who say they don’t like cooking, only 20% or less of them actually actively dislike the process. The others dislike the things around the process, such as cleaning or other capacity restrictions, that make home cooking into a chore or stress. So the recommendation there is to look at the issue from a higher view and determine if you really grant yourself the time, leisure, and capacity to indulge in home cooking.

Regardless, there are important aspects of home cooking you’re neglecting if you really can’t stand to do it yourself.

Handiness

One of the advantages is that home cooking is something you do with your hands. In an excessively digitized world, where more and more work and entertainment alike are bundled into screens that you sit to monitor and engage with, where most consumer products are assembly-built and designed against tinkering and fixing, and where everyday people rarely get to indulge in the results of their own labor, cooking is where you get to do something solely for yourself and your family and then eat it when it’s done!

You get the feel the weight and the texture and the measures of things. You get to stir and beat and pour. You get to bang things around.

You get to make something, and your prize for making something is a satisfying meal.

Taste

And over time the meals get more and more satisfying, because you get to set your own taste standards. You get to use whichever spices you like the most, at whichever quantity you prefer. You can cook pasta as firm or soft as you want.⁵ Prefer crispy or chewy bacon? That’s up to you, buddy.

There are two types of home cooks: recipe followers and tinkerers.

I’m a recipe follower: when I want to try a new thing I find out how I’m supposed to do it, and then I do it a few more times until I’ve memorized the steps and can adjust to my and my wife’s tastes.

My wife is a tinkerer. She makes sauces and gravies out of whatever she finds in the refrigerator she thinks will taste good together. This results in the occasional very strangely flavored and colored topping, but most of the time results in some surprising new concoction that would probably be the closely guarded secret of a famous restaurant chain if my wife had bothered to write it down.

Regardless, our tastes have over the years converged. When you talk about grandma’s home cooking from the good ol’ days, you’re not talking about a recipe. The recipe is the platonic idea. The incredible food grandma made was what she learned and adjusted, eventually effortlessly, eventually instinctually, with her own hands and nose and tastebuds over time.

If you want to know yourself, you should know your tastes. Home cooking is the thing.

Smell

If you stick the road of home cooking long enough, you won’t need hourglasses, egg-timers, alarms, or even much of referencing cooking length. Early on you learn things like flipping the pancake when it bubbles, but you know you’ve really arrived when you can tell exactly when the sweet potatoes are baked through by smell.

When you start out cooking, you think people who do things like walk into a restaurant and say, “Mm, it smells like cilantro!” are wizards. Then you become the person at the store that selects your fresh herbs by smelling them, and doing that alone know what they are.

Smell is half the pleasure of eating and half the sentimentality of home. Home cooking is the thing that gives it its smell. Otherwise your home smells either dank, or of the cleaning fluids and air fresheners that covers up the dankness.

When you enter someone else’s home and enjoy how it smells, it’s likely to be become of home cooking.

Tools

You also renew your relationship with basic tools. A knife is a knife; a skillet, a skillet. But you get to learn your knives, get a favorite skillet. Some cooks are hobbyists and load up on gack. Others get nothing fancier than a rice cooker.

You get a relationship to things you don’t have with most other things. My kettle broke and it made me actually, emotionally sad. I have a new kettle and feel great because it’s a new kettle. The potential! I can make so much hot water with that kettle!

You think I’m joking? Talk to someone who’s chosen the cast iron life. Make a snide joke about offering to wash it with soap. You’ll see.

You can care for things, and that care rewards you with dependability and deliciousness. How many things in your work and your home can you point to and say, “That rewards me for my care for it?” Most of what you’d find fits under the umbrella of art or entertainment. Very few tools.

An extreme example is the slow grinding down of a butcher’s knife to a filleting knife over the course of its life. As these tools age they gain a sort of personality. Woks have wok hai, an essence about them that derives from every meal they’ve cooked before. You learn which burner fits which pan just so, not only in size but in evenness of flame.

You learn about efficiency. Not the corporatese efficiency of wealthy people trying to extract ever more productivity from ever smaller wages. No, you learn to love a garlic press. Perfectly minced garlic at a tenth of the time. Very much worth the annoyance of washing the thing.

Time to think

You ever wished you had time to think? Cooking is the thing.

A watched pot never boils but let me tell you, the thinking you can do while the water heats up is precious. Very little of the individual actions of cooking require much thought. Even reading a recipe is about as basic as interpretation gets.

There’s a trade-off between convenience and self-reflection, and that trade-off is apparent and literal in home cooking. You can just slide a microwavable dinner in and get right to eating, but you can also sit still and chop vegetables while thinking about life. You can listen to music while you cook. You can even watch TV or movies if you want to, albeit not deeply.⁶ You can converse with family and guests.

I’ve obviously thought about much of this essay while cooking. I’ve also thought of a lot of non-cooking related things to. Cooking is scheduled, ritualistic quiet-time when you get to be yourself whether you’re by yourself or cooking with a partner or friend.

And a lot of that me time ends up paying off dividends on stress, goals, and productivity. It divides you from your stress and gives you something to do. It makes you think about what you really want to do. Sometimes you even figure out a solution to a problem you have, the same way sleeping or a bath can help.

And if you ritualize home cooking, you start returning your own time to yourself.

Scheduling

When you first start out cooking, most of its difficulty comes from lack of knowing how to plan out the order of operations of the meal. Things like setting the heat levels and spicing the meat aren’t hard to do, the issue is when you don’t have time to do it because the rice is burning. Or you finish roasting the vegetables only to have another 20 minutes before the potatoes are done, so you either have to either keep them warm without burning them or eat hard potatoes.

Our lives are built of many orders of operations and top-down determined workflows, but cooking lets you invent your own workflow. As you get better and better at it you start instinctually knowing when to do things and that opens up the capacity to do more. This flows outward to your other elements of agency. Home cooking makes days more real.

Setting a regular nightly ritual simply helps. But if you get clever with it, you can make leftovers for work the next day. Or you can spend one day batch cooking for the whole week. Or you can go to the supermarket every day after work and try and test and tinker with things new. I personally recommend a morning that’s always for pancakes, and another morning that’s always for brunch. Home cooking makes weeks more real.

Also as you go about grocery shopping, you gain an instinctual understanding of seasonality in food that the post-scarcity world tries to hide from you. Tons of lifestyle articles and cooking guides will say things like, “Eat seasonal fruits.” What are seasonal fruits? Do you have to study agricultural charts to figure out your best health options? Not really, you just buy whatever’s on sale in the produce section. That’s the stuff that’s in season. After awhile you just know when it’s time to steam artichokes or bake a spaghetti squash. Cooking makes months more real.

Planning ahead

If you struggle to set schedules and stay on top of everything you need and plan to do, home cooking is the thing.

Ultimately, though, when you get in the habit of cooking at home, you progressively get in the habit of plans. Planning what to cook in advance so that you have the proper ingredients in the correct amounts. Planning your day around when you have time to cook, and planning leftovers around when you don’t.

And since you have so much time to think, planning what to do with yourself while you cook.

I’m confident that the majority of my decisions are made while cooking. Since that cooking is also habitualized, it means I have a standard timeframe in which to execute my decisions.

Once again, we arrive at a chicken-and-egg problem: does a disarrayed schedule reduce my cooking, or does my schedule fall into disarray when I stop making the time to cook?

In this sense, planning is not strictly connotative of living your life in the future, but rather tends to make you more aware of the present rather than less. Planning while cooking can be a productivity maxxxer of considering long term goals, or a spiritual maxxxer of considering deeper values and how to live by them, but sometimes it just helps you make clear when you need to get up in the morning and what you want to best do to rest for the night. As banal as that may seem, that’s your life right there and being more in touch with it is better than missing it.

Regardless, when your brain gets in the mode of planning ahead for something simple like cooking a dinner, then saving the leftovers, then making the grocery list for the next meals and so forth, it gets in the mode of making time for itself with all your other activities and desires. You settle the now to think ahead.

For living a self-directed life, home cooking is the thing.

Home gardening

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a home cook will be in want of a garden.

It starts basically enough. You learn you can keep a little array of potted herbs on the windowsill. Now your spice budget is decimated and the spices are fresher.

And then what’s wrong with having a little tomato plant? And if you have a plot, any plot, perhaps some other herbs. Or carrots. Or beans.

And that gets you saving your vegetable scraps, coffee grinds, and eggshells for compost, both reducing your overall waste and helping grow fresher, local food that beautifies your land.

Or of course you don’t have land, because you live in a city. Home cooking is how you turn into one of those forested apartments with plants dangling in every corner. They clean up the air and cheer up your brain.

Home cooking begets home gardening and home gardening begets homesteading. If you want to carve out your own little corner of the universe, home cooking is the thing.

Society, feasts, and dinner parties

There’s a loneliness crisis. There’s a fallout of civic and social engagement. Everyone is divided. Everyone is isolated. We don’t make things anymore. We don’t do anythings anymore. We don’t understand each other. We don’t reach out to each other. Nobody helps each other anymore. Nobody cares about other people anymore.

We need to create institutions. We need to make public spaces. We need to find meeting grounds. We need to create forums for listening. We need to create new free alternative media. We need to tell stories, we need to develop empathy, we need to change education, we need to change values, we need to change culture.

ORRRRR — you can just invite your friends to a dinner party.

To get back in touch with community and social engagement, home cooking is the thing.

Family

The dinner table. This is the traditional, classically observed center of the family across media and time. From books to television, at least.

Social media doesn’t seem to show many family dinners because social media is asocial and turns the family away from dinner.

Everything kids complain about family dinners is the advantage of family dinners. Get off your phone. How was your day today? Finish eating that. These annoyances become the best thing ever once the child grows up and moves away and experiences life without a dinner table.

The home cooking you hated as a kid you turn around and ask your parents for the recipe when you’re an adult. And you can never exactly replicate it because it lacks the touch of your parents. But as you develop your home cooking you raise the expectations of your kids. And thus they go on to ask for the same recipe, to make their own unique food.

If you want to strengthen the ties of family, home cooking is the thing.

Dinner Parties

If you want to get back in touch with a person, a simple meetup at a bar or a restaurant will do. However, it’s hard to square your schedules. Sometimes peole just don’t have the money or time for it. Which restaurants are good, fit our diets, are affordable, and open at this hour?

For instant social hub creation, home cooking is the thing.

People may be busy or you might be far away, but far less people are going to reject a free meal, particularly a nutritious and fresh one, when offered regularly. And the people closest to you both emotionally and geographically will then show up more often and you’ll really start to learn about each other, see each other’s points of view, help one another, and exchange networks and information.

That said, don’t host dinner parties to extract value from your relationships. Hold dinner parties to add value to your relationships. Simply offer food. Food is good, people like food. If you feed people, people will like you. You will be doing good in the world, because you are feeding people.

Feasts

Holidays. Most holidays are festivals. The word festival derives from feast. Feasts are celebrations of a communities’ success in building up the resources available to have a feast. Feasts are eating in acknowledgment that we’ll live to eat again, and there will be food to eat when we get there.

Even national holidays are typically feasts. A Fourth of July barbecue is a type of feast. Thanksgiving is a feast in celebration of a point of time when people feasted.

Christmas may have presents but the real center of the day is the feast. Halloween, arguably, is a feast of synthetic sugars. St Patrick’s Day is a feast of alcohol.

Home cooking is the center of feasts. Bringing the home together to feast. Bringing home cooking to the family, neighborhood, church, or community potluck to share a feast.

Potlucks, Picnics, and Barbecues

If you’re in the habit of regularly feeding people, people will start regularly feeding you. It just grows naturally that way. Home cooking begets home cooking.

It starts with someone bringing a bottle of wine to your home-cooked meal. Then a an appetizer. Perhaps two people come and then you don’t have to worry about the side dishes. Then a group can have a meal complete with desert and all you did is put a roast on during the day.

And then now you and your group are organizing things. See, the thing about group meals is that they aren’t just the eating but also a group activity. Now you have something to do on Sunday, but it doesn’t cost as much as a movie ticket and it lasts twice as long.

And while you’re there in that group eating and drinking and being happy, you can discuss things. Like your troubles with your job, or how you wished you ever tried another activity, or the problem with those damn bankers. And this is how you get organized.

Community Outreach

This is how congregations get to know each other. This is how mutual aide networks begin. This is how neighborhoods start doing those things like doing regular trash clearing or deciding to pool for a monthly book exchange.

This is how activists collate their initiatives and make petitions, plans for demonstrations, and coordinate phone-calls and sit-ins. And, obviously, feed the homeless.

And the key to all this is that it’s home cooking, not “third space” “institutional” “public initiatives.” If you want a social network, home cooking is the thing. Start feeding people, and they’ll start collaborating with you.

If you want to build your culture, home cooking is the thing.

“But I don’t know how to cook!”

I’m gonna make cooking dumb for you:

To learn how to cook, heat up a surface, throw on some fat, and then throw ingredients into the fat and leave it there until it’s ready to eat.

A smarter rule of thumb, one that won’t get cooks⁷ rolling their eyes, is that all you need is heat, fat, salt, and acid.

In cooking’s case, “fat” is all of those media you put in a pan to keep the food from sticking to it. Oils are vegetable fat. Butter is milk fat. Lard is pig fat. Some meats pack enough fat that they cook in their own fat. They’re all fats. The less fatty the fats are, the more processed. Low-fat fats are poison fats. Fatty fats are cholesterol-dense, but some cholesterols are worse than others. Choose your fat, any fat. All fats will do.

If you don’t want fat you can bake or boil. Ultimately it’s likely either will also involve fat or you’ll cook the flavor away, which is indication that the nutrients broke down too. However, to be clear, if you fry everything in fat, you’re gonna get fat. So largely you should offset all your fried fat with some fresh veggies and baked or boiled tubers.

Right, so, you get a hot surface, which is normally a pan, and you add fat to it. The oil or butter or lard or whatever heats up. Then you add your ingredients. All you need to learn over time is which order to put which ingredients in.

Meats like the pan to be hot and smoking before they cook. They don’t need to cook too long, but the ones that you don’t want to cook rare you’ll have the heat lower to cook longer and more evenly.

Hard vegetables and tubers take a while to cook. They’re best for heating on medium or low for a long time and making sure the edges don’t burn so that the insides get all soft and squishy.

Soft vegetables and fungi cook very rapidly. Tomatoes take half a second to cook at all (but usually provide acids). Spices you don’t really want to cook so much as add at the end or after cooking, unless you’re making a sauce.

So, get your tubers boiling or frying, cut your hard vegetables. Throw the hard vegetables into the pot or pan, then cut your soft vegetables. Throw them in then add the meat right before the soft vegetables brown. Then cook everything until it’s brown. Then squeeze some lemon over it all or throw in some tomatoes. Then add salt, pepper, and whatever spice looked interesting and tasty from the spice aisle.

Congrats, you know how to cook. You probably burned something, put too much oil so it’s all gooey, or too little oil so it’s all smoky, or something went wrong. Who cares? Eat it anyway. “You learn how to cook better by eating your mistakes.” My mom said that, so that’s wisdom.

Do it again, or, for better results, do it while following the order of operations described in a recipe.

Now you know how to cook. It’s over, there’s no more excuses.

“But no seriously, I burn water”

I think a large part of what I’m saying in this article is that home cooking is a mindset, and craft / nutrition / hobby aside, I’m really inviting you to attend to something. A watched pot never boils, but a boiling pot left behind will char and break and possibly burn the house down.

The whole point of learning how to cook is to learn how to attend to yourself. It’s an exercise in the best and most meaningful type of patience. There’s plenty in this world we shouldn’t have patience with: the way people treat each other, the way society manipulates you, the way businesses and governments exploit you. But where patience is a virtue, it’s the patience you give to yourself.

If you burnt water it’s because you let yourself get distracted. If you undercooked the food it’s because you were impatient and pulled it from the heat too soon, or kept the heat too high to try to cook it faster (perversely burning the outside and undercooking the inside).

All you have to do is give yourself the grace to give yourself attention, and if you pay attention, then you’ll learn to cook. And if you’ve built up that grace and pay attention, then start back at the beginning of this essay about all that money-saving, diet-choosing, lifestyle-building, community-outreach stuff.

“Change yourself to change the world” &c. Learn to cook to learn self-reliance, learn self-reliance to rely on the world.

Cooking is the thing.

Some Housekeeping (yuk yuk yuk)

I banged this essay out over 3x frenzied writing blocks with purposefully little to no planned editorial direction. I decided rather than try to be smart, or sharp, or precise in my arguments, that I’d rather just let the thoughts banging about my head bang upon the page in a similar fashion.

In sections like the How to Cook section and so forth, I don’t really care if I’m being misleading or inaccurate, or if I come across as opinionated.

Because, you see, there’s a certain Zen to cooking that also makes the words or ideas behind the cooking not matter so much as the experience and action of it, and so I replicated the Zen in the writing. Once the pan is smoking you don’t have a lot of time to go back and unheat it.

Don’t get me wrong — you can. It’s possible in cooking, like in writing, to revert, step backwards, start again, revise with additional relishes and so forth. However it tends to be frustrating and costly, expending many ingredients you don’t want to lose. Cooking is thermodynamics, and the second law of thermodynamics isn’t very nice about unmixing mixtures, unburning things burnt, and re-condensing the steam from boiling water back into the pot. You sort of flow forward and adjust as you go, add things to it to round out flavor and take away things you wanted to cook when you realize that you’re cooking too much or you already have enough starches or whathaveyou.

So I just decided to let this thesis cook, and as a result it might not be the meal you wanted out of reading it. That’s great, because you can make that meal yourself.

Home cooking is the thing.

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This Zen essay is presented for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. This cycle, the theme was “Resolution.”

If you are a writer, you might consider joining us.

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To experience my previous STSC Symposium submissions:

To read my previous essays:

1. Don’t freak out too much about my use of the word poison. Poison is a matter of dosage. Your body can handle a few nitrates, it’s when you eat too much of them that the cancers start forming. You’re not gonna get sick and die from eating a single box of mac&cheese.

2. and living room if you’re a TV dinner person, and bedroom if you’re, you know, a slob. But as an occasional slob, let me be clear that as long as you clean up and do laundry after your meals in bed, then you’re a loveable slob and we love you. Nothing wrong with being a loveable slob, live your life. If you don’t clean up after meals in bed, then you’re just a slob. But I don’t know your life.

3. even if you’re one of those shoes-by-the-door, no-street-clothes-on-the-bed people

4. This takes literally two minutes, thirty seconds to set the potato to bake, then work while you wait, then a minute and a half to apply the sour cream and chives when it’s done. Eat at your desk for all I care.

5. Don’t worry about what your Italian friends may think. They want to eat good pasta with you they can make it themselves. It’s your pasta.

6. If you’re one of those productivity maxxxers, you can listen to podcasts or educational channels while you cook. I would still rank this more as entertainment than productivity, though.

7. or chefs!