“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable stages, those of Survival, Inquiry, and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where stages. For instance, the first stage is characterized by the questions “How can we eat?” the second by the question, “Why do we eat?” and the third by the question “Where shall we have lunch?”

-Douglas Adams,
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy #2)

If you are biological, you need to eat. You need to consume the energy you need to live somehow, no way around it. Plants photosynthesize, animals graze or hunt, and humans go to Wawa. It’s part of the whole “being alive” thing.

For most of our history as a species, what we ate was of greater concern than how we ate it. Douglas Adams hilariously but accurately described it in The Hitchhiker’s Guide quote I gave above. What Adams left to food historians, sociologists, barstool philosophers, and other nerds like myself to debate was how we felt about the act of cooking. Even within the lifetime of the last couple of generations here in the USA, the change in how we as a culture approach cooking and food in general has been massive.

If one is curious enough, one can twist out the wild story from the influences of changing cultural norms, gender roles and expectations, technological developments, and world events like twisting yarn out of cobwebs.

Several books and personalities have investigated this question in depth before- I’ve dipped a couple toes in that ocean myself. I’ll link some of those books throughout this post, but I want to focus on one interesting aspect of it- when and how did cooking for yourself become something to brag about?

Some Clear Caveats

In a lot of cultures both inside and outside of the United States, cooking for oneself isn’t always something to brag about. There are still plenty of folks in my country who insist that cooking is “woman’s work” and will either scoff at the idea of learning to make something for themselves or (if they are women) insist that “boys don’t need to know it because my son will have a wife someday.” I won’t go into great detail about this, simply because I think basing your survival on either always having money and/or having someone with a womb at your beck and call is ridiculous.

In other cultures, dining out regularly is a sign of wealth and success, so cooking at home for anything other than one’s family or guests is an indicator of poverty and therefore poor character. Worldwide, we also (unfortunately) can’t ignore the amount of privilege involved in cooking for oneself, let alone cooking healthy food. A person with limited resources may simply not have the time, facilities, or money to make a healthy meal for themselves or their families regularly. For these folks, eating comes down to a simple but painful calculation of “the most calories I can get for myself and my family per dollar and/or labor hour.”

I used to be one of the crowd that would say “You can make better food for cheaper if you want to!“ blissfully ignorant of the reality that not everyone had the availability, or could bear the financial or time cost, that I could and thus inadvertently shaming folks for giving their kids fast food rather than cooking healthy meals. Seneca said “All cruelty springs from weakness,” and we are always most judgemental about the things we are the most insecure about in ourselves just so that we can say “I’m a hot mess, but at least I’m not that person.” Everyone does what they have to do to live. Check in with yourself before you give your “hot take” on someone else’s situation.

Part of the Job

For much of American history, cooking was a chore . Literally. It was part of a homemaker’s daily labors and an exercise in that same question of household economy- “How do I feed these people as effectively as possible?” Before the advent of grocery stores or convenience products, it was a task that required ingenuity, time, and attention, and it was a pain in the ass. At best, the wealthy had servants dedicated to handling the problem for them, and those people could afford to eat comparatively lavishly. Women in poorer households would have to contend with every aspect of putting food on the table, from baking the bread to tending and slaughtering livestock if there was to be meat.

The idea that it was meant to be enjoyable meant “palatable.” You can’t feed your husband and kids if they won’t eat it, no matter how long it took you to pluck that chicken or get wood for cooking that gruel. “Don’t like it? Don’t eat it and starve.”

The technological and convenience developments that brought America into the middle of the 20th Century didn’t dull this sentiment. Cooking was still a chore… but now there are things we could buy to make it easier. It’s easy to look back at the recipes of the time with their comic amounts of margarine, canned vegetables, canned meats, gelatin, and the use of fabulous labor- and cost-saving machines and ingredients and wonder “who in God’s good name thought this was ever a good idea?! And WHY?!”

The “who” were the businesses answering the domestic labor question posed to them by the newly-minted middle class American housewife, and the “why” was because they had too much other shit to do to. Weren’t they better off than their mothers and grandmothers?! Didn’t they have clean perfect lawns and fences in beautiful clean suburbs? Why should they still have to deal with, ugh, cooking like they did?

They were, they did, and they shouldn’t have to. Enter “TV dinners,” cake mixes, gelatin, canned goods, and recipe books included with their new labor-saving devices where flavor was secondary to making that new Kitchen-Aid they got for their anniversary seem like not the slap in the face it was.

(I say this having received my Kitchen-Aid mixer as a gift from my mother in the mid 2010s when she bought it, decided it was too heavy to bring down from the cupboard, and wanted the light little Sunbeam mixer she’d handed down to me back. A well-made mantainable appliance is worth its weight in gold.)

How, in the space of a few decades, did we get from here to “cottagecore,” recipe TikToks, baking your own bread, and men AND women bragging about being “good cooks?”

#1- Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, and James Beard

Cooking at home will never be interesting or brag-worthy to those who aren’t actively interested in it. It’s an extremely functional skill set that is, unfortunately, still largely treated like a hobby. Through their writings and media presences, however, Child, Pepin, and Beard brought this “hobby” to the mainstream. After much of their careers, they all eventually decoupled “good cooking in America” from Francophilia, making this one-time chore something to have fun with and take pride in. It was okay to get wild, get silly, put down the gelatin and can-opener, pick up some fresh vegetables, and ask the guy at the meat counter for weird stuff.

#2- Times Stopped Being So Good

Sorry Gramps, but the earned dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to when a household could be managed soundly on a single income.

What we earn doesn’t go nearly as far as yours or your dad’s paychecks did, so a lot more people are digging into the old home economics tricks our great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents developed out of necessity. We are cutting costs- making what we can, as best we can, with what is available to us, and even that (as I mentioned earlier) is based on privilege.

If you can manage it, learning to cook at home and meal-plan is a LOT cheaper than eating out regularly, and we are making the best of those convenience products our parents and grandparents left us. No one will deny the usefulness of canned vegetables or soup mixes, but learning to tend a garden, raise livestock in urban environments, and can our own produce is a full-on vibe.

Being able to say “Here’s my great-grandmas green bean cassserole, but I grew the beans myself” is something to be proud of. It speaks of economy, capability, and ingenuity that our parents possibly our grandparents had gotten used to doing without because they had it so much better than their grandparents and why would that ever change?

#3- Rise of Food Media

I went into this a bit more in my book, but food and the cooking of it became a performance art. The ability to perform in the kitchen, mimic professionals, and replicate what they did under time constraints has become something glamorous. What’s more, with production studios Julia Child would have dreamed of functionally available in our pockets and on our desktops, anyone with even passing ability to cook (but a knack for entertaining and a good camera presence) can find themselves elevated to notoriety that even Carême didn’t know until long after his death.

By becoming a sort of performance art, cooking went (for those interested) from becoming a chore to being on par with learning piano to play for guests. Something everyone of culture and breeding and education should surely be able to manage for themselves and others, with all the classist innuendo of those statements fully built in and silently thumbing their noses at the meemaws and old folks who never forgot how to cook for others and take pride in doing it well.

So You Want To Cook More At Home?

First off, can you? You don’t need the biggest and best kitchen appliances- the basics can be accomplished in a kitchenette with a good-sized toaster oven and a couple of hot plates. But do you have the time and curiosity to learn, to suck, and to try again?

Second, do you want to? You are literally never going to be good at it if you hate it, and you will spend a lot of time and money on something neither you nor anyone else will want to eat. It takes time, patience, and curiosity- if you’re just in it for the flex, stick with frozen meals and Hello Fresh until you feel ready.

Being able to cook food is one of our pinnacle achievements as a species. Being able to enjoy food you made is luxury, and food in general is class. The need to eat cannot be gate-kept, nor can learning to make food well. The gatekeepers are asleep. If you can manage it, the only obstacle is you.

Stay Classy,