5 Practical Reasons Why You Should Learn To Cook
Cooking is an ancient human skill. It’s been around in one form or another for at least 100,000 years, and possibly more. Unfortunately, many people in the modern world don’t know how to do it any longer. Thanks to fast food and ready meals, we’re losing the ability to prepare dishes and our lives are suffering as a consequence. In this post, we take a look at some of the practical reasons why you should learn to cook, even if you dislike it. Here’s what you need to know:
You Have Better Control Over Ingredients
If you’ve ever eaten at a cheap restaurant or put a ready-made meal in the microwave, you’ll have noticed something. What you’re eating doesn’t really taste like the real thing. Somehow it’s different from the home-cooked food your mother made you as a child.
The reason for this comes down to ingredient choices. Businesses want to lower costs as much as possible to support their margins. And to do this, they increase cheap ingredients, such as fat, salt, and sugar, and decrease the healthier, more expensive ones, like fresh herbs, fruit, and vegetables.
When you cook at home, you avoid degradation of diet quality. The food you eat is controlled entirely by you.
You Can Prepare Food In Advance
Once you know how to make corn dogs, for instance, it’s easy to batch cook them and put them in the freezer to eat at a later date. The same goes for curries, chilies, bean burgers, and anything else you can think of.
Preparing food in advance is critical for helping us navigate our busy modern lives. On weekdays, you don’t always have the time or energy to cook from scratch. You need quick easy meals you can fall back on.
It Saves You Money
While manufacturers use cheap ingredients in pre-prepared meals and restaurant foods to bump up their margins, it’s still not cheap. Almost always, preparing food yourself is less expensive. And the quality of nutrition you get is significantly higher.
Depending on what you eat, the savings can be considerable. A diet of brown rice, lentils, and cabbage is incredibly cheap and helps to keep costs to a bare minimum.
What’s more, the more you can cut your food bills, the more you have to spend on things like travel and shopping.
It Helps You Look Better
A diet of processed meat, sugary desserts and pizza is not ideal. While your body can survive it for a couple of years when you are young, eventually something will break. And when that happens, your looks and health will suffer.
Home cooking helps you avoid going down this path. Most meals contain fresh ingredients with good nutrition. Practically anything you can prepare at home will be significantly better for your looks than the take-out equivalent. The importance of healthy diet is prominent throughout your life.
It Is Good For Entertaining
Lastly, home-cooked food is great for people who love to entertain. You can cook up a storm in the kitchen and wow your guests. Everyone will want to come to your house for dinner. We hope you found ways on why you should learn to cook.
