Cooking makes us human. Or so says the world famous book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human that details how cooking food was an essential element in the physiological evolution of human beings. Indeed we are all cooks. Or at least we should be, even if what you cook doesn’t always taste the way you’d like it. With home cooked meals, eating local, and sustainable cooking being hot topics of discussion the world over, here are 5 compelling yet under-rated reasons to cultivate cooking as your hobby.
Cooking Could Turn Out to be the Best Hobby You’ll Ever Adopt
#1 Upgrade your skills and transfer them too: Cooking is a skill and one that has the potential to significantly affect your well-being and health. What’s more – your cooking skills extend to many other areas of life including even your occupation in some cases! For example, the hand skills you perfect in baking can help you a great deal in gardening, jewellery making, and even dentistry and surgery by improving the motor coordination and muscle power in your wrists, fingers, and forearm muscles. Above all, making a good meal or baking your favourite cake takes time, teaching you to be patient along the way and who needs proof to acknowledge patience as one of the greatest virtues of life.
#2 Set the cash registers ringing: Well not literally but cultivating cooking as a hobby can double up as a money making activity. In today’s fast-paced urban life, people crave for home cooked meals, sweets, bakery items, pickles, chutneys, etc. but seldom have the time or skill to prepare the same. If you have the cooking genius, you can market yourself online through various social media platforms and in no time you could be helming with a booming home grown business. You could even contribute to a social cause and donate the money you make from cooking towards your favourite charity.
#3 Safety first: Cooking at home saves you – from toxic pesticides, artificial preservatives, colours, chemicals, and sickening bacteria. Home cooked meals typically involve healthier food choices as compared to deep fried, over spicy, and sugar laden food we all consume when we eat out or opt for takeaway. To that end, even Packaging is known to add undesirable ingredients to the food inside and is considered a food additive by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). When it comes to cooking, the method matters significantly. For example, roasting a vegetable helps preserve vitamins that are wasted by boiling it; retaining the peel on many fruits and vegetables provides additional vitamins, and so on. When you cook your own meals, you are in control of the method, the portion, the spices, and the overall outcome is inevitably healthier.
#4: Watch your carbon footprint: Whether you are a student, a blue collared executive, a housewife, or an athlete – eating is undoubtedly your most significant daily interaction with the environment. Data shows that carbon dioxide emissions from a typical restaurant meal are 3.67 times the carbon dioxide emissions of a meal prepared and eaten at home. This does not include the emissions of a consumer driving to the restaurant or food being transported to the restaurants. Not only does home cooking reduce your carbon footprint, it also saves precious natural resources like freshwater and fossil fuel, which the world is struggling to conserve. If it’s a challenge to prepare restaurant style food at home, try a meal kit delivery service like AwesomeChef that delivers pre-measured ingredients with step-by-step recipe instructions to help you make gourmet food within the comfort of your own home.
#5: Eating local is more beneficial than you think: The ‘local food’ movement is gaining momentum the world over and it has solid reason behind it. Eating local basically means consuming what’s in season and grown not too far away. Besides being healthy, fresh, and good for the soil, it significantly impacts the local economy as the money you pay to buy local food items circulates within the local economy itself, creates more job opportunities, and even attracts tourists as ‘local farms’ are fast becoming a trending sightseeing spot.
Health and happiness is all we want
Ultimately what all of us need from food boils down to two things – that we be healthy eating it and that we enjoy the experience of eating it. Cooking your own meals at home is the best and safest way to ensure you get both – plus a bounty of other benefits we just talked about. So bring out your pots and pans, stir that ladle, and call upon the chef in you!
