this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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Psychology
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IMO the healthiest thing a person can do is learn to cook for themselves
Even the simple process of writing recipes down has me looking into healthy ways just to achieve certain affects with the food, not even to adjust the flavor.
Carrot shreds for example can be put into Marinara Sauce to reduce the acidity, a technique courtesy of Northern Italy via Chef Boyardee!
Agreed 100%. Learning to cook also gives people a visual image of ingredients.
If you've never cooked before, reading that a 12oz can of Coke has 39g of sugar in it will just go over your head. As someone who cooks, makes sauces, drinks, etc., I understand that that number is ridiculous for one single drink, I usually use about that much sugar for a gallon of iced tea.
Yup, 90% of what makes manufactured foods so unhealthy is that the ingredients are wildly overportioned basically to cut the corners between homemade/artisan work and industrial mass production.
It's literally built to only be "good enough", and that in part means shoving as much sugar in that bitch as solubility will allow to make sure it'll taste ok-ish even way past when normal equivalents would have spoiled.
This is also why anyone who comes to the US from abroad swears our food tastes sickeningly sweeter than their own domestic equivalents.
Of course then we're getting into HFCS which is a whole can of worms within the can of worms of why home cooking is always gonna be better for you even when you home cook something that's an abomination unto god in health terms like a pizza stuffed pizza or a fry burger or a grilled cheese packed as dense with bacon and caramelized everything and marmalade and anything else you can cram in there as possible. It's because home preparing and assembling the ingredients already takes out a shitton of the sugars that were being used to artificially enhance the taste to cover up the mass manufacture corner cutting.
I think eating a majority home-cooked meals changes your relationship with food as a whole. So that if you were to eat or drink something that had an imbalance of a certain ingredient or was highly processed you can taste it and it tastes much differently than if you eat a majority processed food diet. Food addiction is freakin' awful though, and it affects a lot of Americans. And once an addict, always an addict - even if in recovery =/!
I really wish even in the simplest of ways that people learned (once again) to cook for themselves. I mean we for sure used to do it. But things are so different now, and even people who once used to have shifted towards a lot of convenience foods.
This might sound absolutely awful, because you're encroaching on some nice food science there - but I think the foremost thing that needs to be learned is that not every meal must border "sublimely tasty." And to find the joy in the simplicity and essence of a thing being the forefront of what can slowly translate into a wider experience of flavor down the line. But starting off simple, finding things you can manage without feeling overwhelmed or utilizing every dish in the kitchen. I think this is the best approach. Because flavor is wonderful, but it is hard to understand if you don't even know where to start. And that is what has held up a lot of people I know that are my age (in their 30s). Because their own parents did not cook, or did not cook often. And they did not participate in kitchen rituals. And they have a very poor understanding of what to do with a kitchen as a whole. Which I think is why they always joke learning to boil water is the first place to start.