I was never much of a cook.
There’s a certain irony there, my first job as a teenager was as a night cook, but in a truly horrible restaurant. Not quite a fast-food joint, or maybe it was a fast-food joint in a tiny chain with pretensions to being a real restaurant. The grill and deep-fat fryers were in constant use, but I don’t even remember if we had an oven, I certainly don’t recall ever using one.
My mother is of a generation that didn’t see the need for men to know how to cook, never taught me much, and as with many things in my very-sheltered youth I grew up just taking the constant availability of cooked food at home for granted. As a result, when I got out on my own pretty much the only things I made for myself were scrambled egg sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, with hot dogs once in awhile until I realized that they were making me feel sick. I was a lot skinnier then.
I did a lot of backpacking when I was young, and some camping otherwise, and generally if nominally “cooked” outside, but that was mostly stuff that was either edible out of the package, or freeze-dried food (commercial or surplus LRRPs) that merely needed to be reconstituted with boiling water, or, occasionally surplus C-rations or MREs that just needed to be heated. You can do that sort of thing for many years and never get closer to the skills needed to make raw materials into a meal. There were isolated exceptions, paw-paw trees providing snacks along the way, I managed to catch a trout on a hand-line once but had no frying pan, and cooked it on a rock heated on the fire. It was edible. That’s about the best I can say for it.
In later, more prosperous years I frequented real restaurants a lot more but didn’t cook more. An occasional omelet, some experimentation with sourdough bread. I always felt the lack, felt that I should improve my skills (and redeem myself for that first job experience), it seemed like one of those basic competencies that a person should have- very basic, we’re talking here about actually being able to feed yourself- but I never made it a high priority. It wasn’t that it wasn’t important, I think it was sort of a “blind spot” created, at least for males, in a culture where cooked food is abundantly available almost everywhere. The attitude sort of reminds me of the times I’ve been asked why I would carry a lighter if I don’t smoke. Starting a fire is one of the most basic capabilities a human can have, a capability that may have had a role in making us human, but we are so terribly insulated from the fundamentals in life that it’s just no longer obvious to us. It’s on a par with one of the famous frequently-asked questions by tourists of docents and others involved in Living History projects, “why would anyone want to carry water”?
Speaking of reenacting, I did try to cook a little when involved with that as well.. but I was not terribly successful, and the reenacting groups typically revolve around food provided for the whole group by teams of very competent women who seem to enjoy doing so, there’s very little incentive there. I did run across a curious mind-set about it at the time where the ladies actually resented any attempt we made to cook for ourselves, I think I may write something about that later.
So, when Blue Apron came around and it coincided with a weird period in my life when I had spare time, I was intrigued. For anyone who still doesn’t know (despite ever-more-heavy advertising), Blue Apron sends sort-of kit meals in a box, pre-measured fresh ingredients, spices, condiments, everything of good quality, with pretty detailed instructions, on a subscription basis. I saw that as an opportunity to finally gain at least passable basic cooking skills, with the goal of eventually transitioning away from the kits.
Approaching a year later, at this writing it worked, pretty much. I’m cooking routinely, and transitioning ever further away from the prepared kits, though I remain grateful for the exposure to many new dishes and several techniques. I’ve extracted the items I liked best from many Blue Apron meals into individual recipes and modified them to my own liking and prepare them often. I’ve managed to create many tasty meals in a row, and it’s been a long time since the last real disaster, but I still think I’m a beginner who’s gotten the hang of a few basics.
I was frustrated, though, in trying to learn about cooking the way that I like to learn about anything, from basic principles, and starting at the beginning. Although many of the basic principles are covered well by America’s Test Kitchen, which is an admirable effort to bring science and engineering and repeatability to cooking .I have and use two of their excellent cookbooks, which I find preferable to dealing with their websites which seem to try to monetize every third mouseclick, but they have the reputation that their recipes really work, unlike many that depend, whether the writer knows it or not, on factors that apply only to a particular cook, a particular kitchen, or particular varieties or brands of ingredients.
Still, I was really looking for something more basic, something talking about the origins of cooking, WHY we cook at all, how necessary it really is, perhaps how it changed over the millennia with the introduction of enclosed fireplaces, of metal, of stoves…
The closest I’ve found, and it is a “find”, is the excellent (but not perfect) book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham, which I linked to earlier. It changed my thinking entirely, and convinced me that cooking IS indeed very necessary, that it is universal in human cultures for good reason, and presented a great deal of evidence that we are physically evolved to eat cooked food, and cannot thrive, in the long term, without cooking. Those facts turn cooking into a survival issue, and being able to cook and create and control fire from a nice-to-have skill to a mandatory survival skill.
There’s irony there, I’ve always been an advocate of the idea that food is NOT a short-term survival priority. I’ve fasted for 3-4 days several times, for at least 7 days twice, it’s just not a big deal (unless you have other health problems, and a great many people are addicted to simple carbs/sugar, in which case your body’s ability to generate the enzymes necessary to process fats- including your body fat- tends to atrophy). You can go weeks without food, so however uncomfortable the concept is (and the fear of hunger is usually far worse than the hunger) it simply is NOT a short-term priority. Still, you see “survival” kits that include candy, granola bars (candy), bouillon cubes, even tea bags all the time. It’s just ridiculous- what else would you ever put in a short-term survival kit that you were guaranteed NOT to really need for weeks?
So it’s ironic now that while I still hold that opinion, I’ve come to understand that not just the acquisition of food but cooking is an essential survival skill in the longer run.
Which brings us to cultural gender issues, and MGTOW (men going their own way), about which I expect to have a lot more to say over time that I’ll probably link in here.
Here’s the gender bias as I see it. Despite our attempts to transcend gender stereotypes, men are and have always been culturally allowed and encouraged to cook for groups and gatherings. It’s often repeated that “the best chefs in the world are men”. I don’t know if that’s really still true or not, but there’s certainly nothing keeping men from learning to cook very well indeed. Men are and have always been culturally allowed and encouraged to cook outside for family gatherings, or even just for immediate family… but a man who cooks for himself or only for his immediate family INDOORS is looked at askance, as though he were a peculiarity.
Men, this is obviously just a cultural bias, and one that cannot be allowed to persist. The situation is so absurd that even within MGTOW circles, where men routinely take pride in their independence from women, “MGTOW cooking” is regarded as a joke, and men seem to take tacit pride in their inability to cook, at least indoors.
Men, if the theses of Catching Fire is correct, and the author presents a great deal of compelling evidence, then, again, cooking is necessary for humans to thrive. Cooking is a basic survival skill. Cooking is, literally, BEING ABLE TO FEED YOURSELF.
How self-sufficient can you ever be if you can’t feed yourself adequately in a variety of circumstances? How independent of women can you ever be if you are dependent on women to feed you? Is there anything subtle about this problem? You need to eat cooked food. If you don’t cook, you will always be dependent on others that do.
We live in an age where a large and growing fraction of women have made it clear that they “don’t need men”. I think they’re kidding themselves, at least so far, because they are generally surrounded by and completely dependent on things almost entirely created by and maintained by men. How many women worked on the building you’re in right now? How many worked on building the roads outside? How many women elevator mechanics or jet engine repair technicians have you seen or heard of? I am NOT saying that women can’t do these things, or shouldn’t, I’m just pointing out that whether because of nature or culture they do not (so far) seem generally much INTERESTED in doing that kind of work.
Still, women are entirely within their rights to assert their independence from men (and reject the idea of cooking for them) if they care to, and rather than resisting that in any way, men asserting their independence from women (thus helping them liberate themselves) is the only sane, reasonable and ethical response.
A rapidly increasing percentage of women now don’t know how to cook and are just not much interested in cooking, which is fine… but it means that even if you are NOT interested in being independent from women at all, there’s a growing likelihood that nobody’s going to be doing much cooking for you at home for most of your life. If you want to remain healthy, you cannot limit your entire diet to fast foods, processed foods and ready-to-eat foods. We can survey what that is doing to us as a nation on any sidewalk.
So, guys… it’s time for a change. Think of it as a necessary next stage of weaning. Feed yourselves. If you don’t know how, learn, and learn how to do it well. Make it a point of pride.
– Robert the Wombat