foodperson.com

Do you fear cooking? Admire it, perhaps—but shrink from the stove like a vampire from garlic? Well, pots and pans be praised! I’m here to say you can do it. Not only that, but doing it will make the world a better place. Really.

You can do it

If you’re reading this, you can read directions. If you can follow directions, you can cook. (In cooking, the directions are called recipes, by the way.) Case in point: Baby Sister treated me to a delicious dinner on Friday that she cooked herself. She kept saying I did it, but that’s not true. I just chopped some stuff and helped keep her on track amid the distractions of children. She, who claims she can’t cook, grilled the chicken and made the rice and did them perfectly without any coaching from me whatsoever.

If you lack confidence, maybe it’s because you see too many recipes that use terms you don’t understand or that provide sketchy instructions. In that case, get yourself a good, basic cookbook that provides how-to information and such helps as glossaries and substitution guides. Here are three possibilities:

• How to Cook Everything: The Basics
• How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food
• The Joy of Cooking

How cooking makes the world better

If you’re cooking, rather then reconstituting or heating up packaged foods, you’re helping the world in several ways. You’re almost certainly:

• using less packaging, thus using—and discarding—fewer resources.
• ingesting fewer potentially harmful additives, reducing not only your and your family’s exposure, but also workers’ exposure to these additives at food and chemical plants.
• getting better nutrition. Something happens in the processing of foods to make them suitable for the grocery shelf. Your typical processed food, as compared with your typical homemade food, is higher in salt, higher in fat, lower in fiber and lower in vitamins and minerals unless they’ve been boosted with supplements. The homemade food adds up to better health and lowers risk of our society’s major illnesses: heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and, probably , cancer.

That’s all pretty much fact. But I contend that if you’re cooking from scratch, you’re also more likely to:

• serve locally produced foods and organically grown foods, raising your personal contribution to bettering the environment.
• share your efforts with others. It’s much more likely you’ll invite someone to join you to eat your homemade grilled-cheese sandwich (with real cheese and good bread) than your Stauffer’s macaroni and cheese. Sharing is good for the soul and society.
• pay attention to what you eat. You put effort into it, so you’re going to want to see how it tastes. Besides, the flavors and textures are considerably more varied with real food vs. the packaged kind, which hits you in the mouth with salty and sweet to hide the blandness of the processed product. Paying attention will prompt you to eat more real food and lose your taste for processed foods.
• waste less. That’s just a guess, but the prefab stuff is bad enough fresh, let alone left over and reheated.
  

Benediction

OK. I’ll admit some home cooks can cook the life and taste out of just about anything, can salt dishes beyond salvation, can add enough fat to clog your calories in a flash. Besides, fat and salt and sugar taste good. But so do good fresh foods if you give them a chance, and cooking is a lot easier than might you think. In fact, once you get the hang of it, it’s fun, and the world needs more fun of that kind.

So get thee to the kitchen. Sharpen that knife. Wash those strawberries. May you eat well with your home cooking, and blessings to you for your part in saving the world.