Science of Cooking

Two things can be true at once. Straight from the article:

It's important to note, however, that cooking skills alone cannot solve the affordability problem

Anecdotally, I only know a handful of Americans, of any age, who can cook much of anything. In contrast, my wife is Philippina and all those girls can cook. When you grow up poor, you learn.

For us Americans, food's been stupid cheap for decades. Why learn to cook? I think that's caused some cultural weirdness. I remember my ex-wife and I talking cooking to my Millennial niblings. They thought cooking was more expensive! They would start with an empty fridge and pantry, buy everything for a given recipe and complain how much a single meal cost. You see where I'm going with this. 🙄

More weirdness, or ignorance, is thinking that cooking is time consuming and burdensome. Not if you can cook! First couple of times my wife asked if I wanted devilled eggs I thought, "Hell yes I do! Really don't want to wait that long..." (minutes later...) "Here you are babe." Still don't know how she does that.

Same goes for growing some food. It's easy and cheap if you learn the skills. You can hardly kill or screw up potatoes, onions, peppers, garlic, etc. Stick it in the ground, come back later, receive food.

Now that food's not cheap, we should learn to cook. Maybe that's a good thing? Given our obesity "epidemic", people having to cook healthier meals sounds like a win. Also, the market will adjust food prices down when people aren't buying fast food. I've all but completely quit eating out. And I've lost a bit of my little beer gut. Imagine that.

(LOL, sorry OP. Stuck on the phone with customer service so I dropped a novel on you.)