The point isn’t that cooking is hard to learn. It’s that it’s harder to learn than continuing to eat convenience food. But it’s still not the easiest thing and therefore not realistically going to be people’s default unless we encourage them by somehow making it worth their while.

For some, just spreading awareness of how much healthier it is can be enough. For others, they’ll need systemic changes like access to healthier ingredients, metal health treatment, and jobs that don’t exploit them so harshly that they have no leftover energy to cook.

cooking for yourself requires a few pots and pants

Yeah, you can start out with just pots and pans to make pasta, rice, beans, boiled or stir fried pre-cut vegetables, and other simple things. No knife and cutting board, no whisk, no cheese grater, no vegetable peeler, sure you can cook but it’s going to be challenging. Now you’re asking someone to go from being able to microwave a fully assembled frozen meal in 3–5 min, which they’re used to doing, to making a meal from ingredients with a substandard set of tools and little to no experience.

By the time they’re done cooking they’re going to be tired and frustrated by the result. If they’re lucky they’ll have the motivation to keep trying, building skills, and purchasing more equipment.

If they’re unlucky, they’ll see people on the internet belittling them for lacking a skill and tool set that not everyone gets handed to them by family and circumstance.

It costs you minimal effort to not be judgmental and discouraging to an entire category of people comprised of widely varying individuals whose circumstances you know nothing about. But you’re acting like that’s some cruel undue burden.

ah yes the free market enabled by small government 🤦‍♀️

I’m not at all saying to throw in the towel. Quite the opposite. I just want people to be more understanding and less judgmental so we don’t push people even further away from learning self subsistence habits like cooking.

I remember as a little girl asking my mom to sew me a dress “because then we don’t have to pay for it,” and her explaining to me that fabric isn’t free, and it’s not even cheaper than clothes anymore. I was so disappointed and bewildered. Today, I’m still disappointed.

She also taught me how to make bread and I asked her if it was cheaper than store bread, so we sat down with grocery store receipts with the price of flour etc. and worked out that our recipe came to about $0.50/loaf (in ~2007). We didn’t factor in the cost of labor, heating gas, electricity for the bread machine, etc. but it was one thing we enjoyed knowing costed less than even the cheapest bread at the store.

I still make bread, but am afraid to do the math again.

I would argue that most people don’t make their own clothes mainly because the time and effort required to make clothes is VASTLY disproportionate to the time and effort required to buy clothes.

For food, it’s the same. Learning to cook palatable meals from ingredients (anywhere on the preprocessed spectrum not just raw) requires a lot of learning and often new kitchen equipment.

Especially if you’re truly starting from 0, as in no cooking knowledge was taught to you by family or community and you didn’t inherit any equipment.

Why should we expect people to sacrifice the time, money, and energy that their job is demanding more and more of from them as time goes on? Is cooking really different from all the other domestic skills that are no longer expected to be known by at least one household member?

More importantly, if encouraging cooking really is a more efficient way to improve average nutrition, why are we so quick to scoff at people who don’t know this skill, instead of acknowledging the myriad of reasons they were discouraged from acquiring it and using that knowledge to help us campaign more effectively?

(not saying you specifically were scoffing but def other people in this thread and people I’ve discussed this with IRL have, including myself in the past)

other essential survival skills include:

• finding and sanitizing water
• building fire
• hunting, foraging, and growing food
• building shelter
• making clothing
• treating minor illness and injuries

~100 years ago, most people either know how to do most of these things or had an immediate family member who did. Today, that’s no longer true.

It probably would be better if we all still usually knew how to do all these things (at least in my opinion). But we collectively decided that it was more important that most people just know enough to keep themselves and some kids alive between shifts at work.

Just because a bunch of us have the blessing of the ability to cook food doesn’t give us license to expect all our fellow citizens to do it when we have actively encouraged them not to need this skill anymore.

I’m lucky that my mom taught me basic sewing repair, and I really wish most humans knew even basic sewing because of how staggeringly wasteful modern fashion is. But most people would call me crazy if I started insisting that everyone should know how to sew and that people who don’t are inferior, irresponsible, etc.

Even if they didn’t, how likely am I to convince more people to sew if I come out swinging with insults?

devils advocate: do most people not make their own clothes because it takes effort and they’re lazy?

every time someone says “just cook it’s not that hard” i lose a little more faith in humanity. I’ve spent >14 years cooking as a hobby and for health/finances but “just cook” to me sounds just like

“just fix your own car”
“just paint your own walls”
“just grow your own food”
“just homeschool your kids”
“just sew your own clothes”

you can absolutely do these things yourself! but it’s also become socially acceptable, socially expected even, to outsource these kinds of specialized tasks to specialists.

“but everyone needs to eat!” yeah, everyone needs clothes too and we don’t expect people to make their own anymore because we collectively decided we wanted everyone to spend more time at work instead.

I mean, I did sorta try not to be a nuisance with it. At least for large downloads I tried to do those late at night and then unthrottle once they finished

but one night I fell asleep with the throttling left on and then the next morning my landlady knocks on my door with one of my neighbors who’s rather distraught looking, and says “I know this is weird to ask but you’re my granddaughter’s age and she’s good with tech… [neighbor] works from home and can’t get her video calls to connect, can you reset the router for us?”

10 minutes later I’m a “hero” and got to experience a truly deserved level of guilt 🫠

the router admin page was left on default login credentials

i used it to throttle everyone else’s internet when I had large downloads or video calls. I was the horror story

(this is not good neighborly behavior and years later in retrospect i regret it)

What do hardworking lab technicians deserve but rarely get?

happy hangin-stuff-on-vertical-surfaces 😁

What I’ve been doing is shuffling the debt between new 0% APR intro-period cards every time the 0% of the previous card is going to expire, and just eating the cost of the balance transfer (usually 3–5%) which is still significantly lower than if the balance were to start getting hit by typical card APR (~25%)

I have considered doing bankruptcy but yeah I’m worried about wage garnishment. Also I had wanted to maybe buy a houseboat within the next 7 years but at this point that’s almost certainly off the table so it may actually be worth just looking into bankruptcy at this point.

Right now I’m more focused on getting a full time job since my freelance stuff has been too slow to pay all the bills…

Being a grownup is so boring I hate this

in that case I highly recommend also getting the little rubber charging cord holders to grip the bottom of each utensil so when you inevitably fling the cupboard door open in a rush because you forgot the damn bay leaf again, the utensils don’t go swinging about making a ruckus lol

for larger things I use a second sideways hook or cord keeper clip at the side/bottom. these ones:

mitigating small apartment problems one adhesive hook at a time

congrats on the car fix!

About 2 years’ worth of rent (I live in NYC, to give an idea) in credit cards and a similarly large chunk in student loans

I was someone who paid off my balance in full at the end of every month for about 10 years, then bam, COVID, more fuck shit, rent needing to be paid via credit card several months (even more expensive as they take a usually 5% or more fee), and here we are

Spending money. Thorough a combination of a lot of bad luck and a few bad choices, I’m stuck playing credit card musical chairs to keep enough cash for rent and bills. “Ability to buy groceries/toiletries/medical copays/etc.” is functionally a subscription for me. Few years of rice and beans in my future until I can dig myself out… good thing I like beans I guess

The worst I can imagine (aside from housing…) would be the others in Maslow’s pyramid base: air, water, food, clothing.

• Air would be some straight up cyberpunk shit.
• Water/food would also be horrifying. We currently see meal subscriptions as a luxury, but for those without access to a kitchen and/or with disabilities that prevent them from reliably using one… ah fuck that’s dismal.
• Clothing would be fuckin weird. Because such a ridiculous volume of it exists due to fast fashion, I can’t see this happening on Earth in the near future, thankfully.

you can be the mouse fixer of the friend group. trade fixed mice for casseroles and rides to the airport

i gifted one of these, they’re awesome lol