All Stirred Up: Cooking as a Survival Skill
A passionate and practical case for making your own damn food.
You know one of the most pronounced differences I’ve observed between healthy and unhealthy people? Skills.
Healthy people typically possess a set of basic (and in some cases, advanced) life skills that help them stay healthy. Less healthy people do not have as many of those skills — yet.
Obviously, I’m overgeneralizing and oversimplifying here. The privileges of wealth and social status all offer a wide variety of health advantages — from safe, walkable neighborhoods and well-stocked pantries to better health care.
But, even so, a lot of wealthy folks lacking healthy-person skills don’t have their health situations managed much better than the rest of us. In many cases, their exposure to temptations and excesses (and their reliance on the labor of others) winds up working against them.
So here’s the way I see it: Even if you can afford to hire a private chef or have all your food delivered, if you don’t know how to cook your own food in ways you genuinely enjoy and find nourishing, you’re missing a basic survival skill.
Because at some point, for whatever reason, you may not have access to all the food-preparation and delivery services that you do now. And because there is something innately satisfying and sanity-preserving about owning your relationship with your food.
Being able to steward what you eat — from raw ingredients to satisfying meal — gives you a huge amount of freedom, flexibility, and security.
Sadly, basic home-cooking skills have been in steady decline for decades now— since the processed-food boom began in the 1950s.
Over just a couple of generations, hands-on cooking and home-economics classes have been largely phased out of schools. And in the same time period, no-cook eating options (e.g., drive-through, take-out, packaged, and home-delivered) have proliferated.
There are many reasons for this, including shifts in agricultural policy and practice as well as shifts in family life (divorce, two-working-parent households, etc.). But any way you slice it, the net result has been a mass, multigenerational loss of basic cooking capacity — and a massive increase in our reliance on industrially produced food.
A recent consumer survey of 2,010 respondents suggests that less than half of U.S. adults currently consider themselves proficient in the kitchen. To be fair, that survey was reported by an Angus beef supplier and based on sketchy research, but a more academic study published in the Journal of Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences similarly suggests that our collective cooking capacity is drifting downward.
The majority of food educators surveyed for that study agreed that over the past 10 years, cooking skills among U.S. adults have decreased, and at present, the bulk of adults and young adults lack foundational food know-how.
Many scholars conclude that those skills have been lost less through sociocultural happenstance than by industrial design.
A 2010 report by the Pan-Canadian Health Network, for example, posits that “planned restructuring within the agri-food industry and food systems” has resulted in the intentional “deskilling” of consumers — with “significant consequences on consumer choice, diet and health.”
The authors assert that …
The role of players within the food system, notably processors, retailers and restaurants, on food choice and food consumption patterns is undeniable. According to Cash, Goddard and Lerohl19 the food industry is essentially the gatekeeper of food choice, determining the products consumers can choose and modifying behaviours through available offerings and marketing practices.
It should be noted that the research into how real people cook — or do not cook — at home is rather limited, and often conflicting.
Some studies show rising levels of interest and confidence in cooking, with credit alternately given to popular cooking shows, the influence of culinary social media, COVID lockdown, and budgetary necessity.
But many studies reporting that Americans are “cooking at home more than ever” fail to separate home-prepared meals (which might be built entirely or in part from pre-processed, packaged food products) from more basic, whole-food cooking.
Here’s the good news: It doesn’t really matter what everybody else is doing. If you want to learn the renegade skills of home cooking, you can.
I’m not talking here about investing yourself in fussy recipe-following or complex, Food Network type preparations (although there’s nothing wrong with getting fancy if you find it fun). I’m talking about quickly, easily throwing together whatever simple, whole foods you have access to in ways that taste good and nourish you well.
These days, that’s pretty much the only kind of cooking I do. And I recognize that this workman-like ability of mine is the result less of innate talent than good fortune.
I got lucky growing up on a farm where we cooked and ate most of our meals at home, and where we kids were included in many aspects of the food-preparation process. We were typically present and involved (not plugged into electronic devices) as family meals came together, so we picked up a lot of kitchen wisdom and skills by osmosis.
While we had very little money, we grew, canned, and froze a lot of our own food, so we had access to good, basic ingredients all year ‘round. And living in a rural area, other options were strictly limited. There were no restaurants anywhere near us — not even drive-throughs — and also no convenience stores.
So the default in our family was: If you’re hungry, go gather some food from the garden or rummage in the fridge and then make yourself something to eat.
But even back in the mid-1970s, when I was growing up, this sort of culinary self-reliance was by no means the norm.
I recall my mom grinding wheat kernels and making her whole-grain bread on a weekly basis. And I recall how suspiciously my brown, crumbly, leftover-stuffed sandwiches were regarded by kids whose sandwiches of white bread, baloney, and pre-sliced cheese seemed so perfect and precise by comparison.
I remember back in the early 80s, when my sisters and I moved to the city to live with my father, how much more reliant we became on prepared and processed foods for the majority of our meals and snacks — and how quickly we began to gain weight.
By the time I went to college back in the late 80s and early 90s, very few of my classmates knew how to cook an egg or make rice — much less make macaroni and cheese without a powdered-sauce packet involved.
And that missing-skill situation has only gotten worse over the past 30 years.
So yeah, I feel fortunate to be capable of whipping up a quick meal with whatever I have on hand. Sometimes that’s a roast chicken with all the fixins. And sometimes it’s a can of sardines smashed into a salad dressed with olive oil and lemon.
I also had the advantage of living with a professional chef for a few years, and I learned a lot just from sitting at the kitchen counter and watching him cook.
It often struck me, as I haphazardly developed my kitchen skillset in this way, that I COULD have learned these skills a lot earlier in life if I had made it a priority.
But, oh well, bygones. These intermediate culinary skills are now mine to keep, and I continue to enjoy building on them. Because I continue to enjoy eating good food. And because I continue to appreciate the functional, vitality-boosting effect that has on my body-mind health.
At some point along the way, the act of cooking — even simple cooking — evolved for me into something more than a must-do chore and became a pleasurable, intrinsically rewarding, Flow-producing practice.
I believe that regularly cooking this way has improved not just my physical and mental health, but also my confidence, my self-sufficiency, and my social wellbeing.
I recently joined a small group of friends in what we are calling a “cookbook club.” Each person or couple takes turns hosting on a month by month basis. The host picks an interesting cookbook and chooses a main dish they will make, and then everybody else picks a side dish to prepare from the same book and it all comes together at a fun dinner party.
All of us get exposed to new recipes and techniques — without having to cook everything ourselves. We also get more practice enjoying yummy homemade food and sharing it with friends.
I am aware that this is a wild luxury of sorts — both having the time and resources to invest in cooking this way (for fun) AND having friends with the inclination, space, and basic kitchen capacity to host these sorts of events.
A few years back, I learned that in my rural-Wisconsin ZIP code, fully 25% of residents live below the poverty line.
In many of my neighbors’ kitchens, a county worker explained to me, there are no cutting boards or cooking knives. There are no pots and pans. There is only a microwave — and maybe a can opener.
Virtually all of the food prepared in homes like these comes prepackaged. It tends to be quite expensive on a per-serving basis, sometimes costing upwards of ten times as much as raw ingredients would. And a great deal of it qualifies as “ultraprocessed,” which means it is also coming at a very high cost to people’s health.
But eating in this pre-packaged way doesn’t require the significant up-front investment in basic kitchen equipment and pantry staples that make home cooking doable. And of course, it doesn’t take as much time to prepare or clean up.
So what is a financially-strapped family supposed to do? And how is a busy working family supposed to find the time to shop, cook, and manage the mess that whole-food cooking often involves — much less learn the skills involved in doing all of that with relative ease?
I don’t pretend to know the solution, because like to many vexing health-related problems today, this is not a “me” or “you” problem, it is an “us” problem.
Our lack of cooking skill and inclination are both the result of living in an unhealthy society that has — often for industrial profit — separated us from our ability to provide from our most basic needs.
Somehow, over the past 50 years or so, the prospect of cooking food from scratch, which used to be the only way to cook, has come to be seen as daunting — or worse, precious and “elite.”
But it’s still both faster and cheaper to throw an egg in a frying pan than it is to make your way through a fast-food drive-through. And the chef I lived with often said most of his cooking simply involved taking raw ingredients and applying heat to them.
Did the application of his professional skills elevate those efforts? Undoubtedly. But when it comes to creating an edible finished product with a far more limited range of skills invested, my own amateur efforts still serve me quite well.
Toss some freshly sliced garlic or onions into a hot pan glazed with a little puddle of olive oil, and you’ll see what I mean.
You CAN cook, or at least you can learn to cook at a level that allows you to eat reasonably well at home whenever you want to.
Of course, cooking is just one of many healthy-person skills. But to me, simple home cooking is among the most basic and rewarding skills — right up there with breathing.
Being a healthy person in our unhealthy world has become rather a complex art these days, but it doesn’t have to be as insurmountable as it might seem. And the more skills you master in this space, the easier getting and staying healthy will become.
Which reminds me: This Wednesday, Feb. 5th at 6PM Central, I’m inviting nutrition coach and chef Kenzie Osborne to be a guest expert in my Healthy Deviant U membership experience.
She’ll be showing us how to prepare a couple different dishes (a beef and bean minestrone stew and an apple crisp). And she’ll be inviting us to cook right alongside her in real time.
I think learning to cook this way — at somebody’s elbow (or virtual elbow) — is the best way.
In part because it is so human-scale and non-intimidating, and in part because when you run into questions (“Wait, how do I cut this onion without having it slide all over the place?), there is someone to ask.
👉 I’m inviting all members of my wider Healthy Deviant community to join this cook-along demo, and that includes YOU!
The event is free. All you have to do is sign up here. And when you do, I’ll also send you Kenzie’s prep list (under separate cover) so you can shop ahead and cook along with us in real time, if you like.
If you’re a paid subscriber to this newsletter, you’ll also get access to the replay and some additional related goodies in your +Depth Charge delivery next Sunday.
Meanwhile, if you are already reasonably competent at making your own food, give yourself a big ol’ pat on the back. You are a Healthy Deviant outlier.
If you aren’t feeling all that competent or confident in the kitchen, you might consider what’s holding you back from learning.
I’m guessing that you are busy and perhaps a bit overwhelmed. Here in the Unhealthy Default Reality, most of us are.
But having even a few simple whole-food meals in your repertoire (crispy chicken thighs with sautéed greens, anyone?) can make the difference between a life of processed-food dependency and a life of gratifying food autonomy.
And that can make all the difference between whether you thrive in this unhealthy world of ours, or submit to its vitality-sapping, resource-sucking defaults.
My advice: Do not submit. Do not settle for eating what the machine serves you.
Get fired up instead. Stir the pot of revolution. Write the menu of your life for yourself, and let your gifts to our shared world be nourished by it.
P.S. Wanna join me and healthy-food chef Kenzie Osborne for a fun cook-along demo this coming Wednesday, Feb. 5th at 6PM? Sign yourself up for free right here.
I remember about 20 years ago, signs suddenly showing up at KFC, 7-11, etc..... that they were accepting the State assistance cards. Food Stamps used to be used for basic items. It all spirals. If families eat KFC, they will not have enough to have the money last for the whole month. And now that a generation no longer knows how to cook, the option of buying basics and making it last a week, is no longer an option.
Thank you so much for the restacks! 😇