Since the edit timer has passed, I didn't intend to imply that cooking is only ever a menial activity.

The word came to mind thinking about coming home from a rough day at work and needing to put something, anything together to eat when you'd rather be doing literally anything else.

I'm not talking about a planned meal where some actual planning and effort went into a meal that the cook is hoping you'll enjoy, I'm talking about the results of "i'm tired and hungry and I need to make something and I'm hating the entire process" kind of meals.

The kind of cooking where you mechanically put something together without much thought because you're at the end of your rope for the day.

Obviously such a concept expands well beyond "cooking". Replace that with car maintenance, lawn care, programming, writing, etc. People enjoy different things, and would prefer to replace those activities they don't enjoy with something else.

Being able to is privilege, but I (personally) draw a hard line at calling that laziness.

Optimizing your time so that you can live your life the way you want to is a great idea. I daydream of having a personal chef so I can spend more time reading, studying, or any other activity that brings meaning to my life. But let's be honest, most of that time that people are freeing up with Uber Eats is spent scrolling through social media or watching Netflix.

Assumption: cooking isn't interesting or enriching.

I think you could replace HN time with cooking, and it would be both more interesting and saving money definitely makes it more enriching

Cooking food that is good for your body is not menial - it's central to living. Many people these days (myself even relatively recently) might choose a TV dinner so they don't miss any of that critical episode of House Hunters rather than spend 20 minutes throwing together a stir fry from raw ingredients. It is a lazy choice.

All I'm seeing from your comment is insulting OP's desire to not spend time cooking, and shaming it as being lazy. You don't even bother to back up your claim that it's not menial. Is shame really all you have to bring to the conversation?

By the same token, OP was being insulting to people who choose to cook, and shaming it as being uninteresting.

I don't think it's the most charitable interpretation in either case.

I think they just meant it's uninteresting to them. I know how that feels. I really hate cooking myself. It's just so hard getting regular healthy meals another way

That's what I meant. The "menial" adjective was more describing something that is uninteresting to a person that is either basic and mechanical in the simplest form. As someone who loves good food, I am well aware that good cooking takes skill and effort. The meal made when I get home from a rough day at work and would rather be doing anything else is rarely an example of that.

I made some seasoned rice, a cucumber salad, and some sesame seed encrusted seared Ahi the other day. It was delicious and healthy, but it took 2 hours to put together, eat, and clean up after. That's not something I'm going to have the desire to do every day.

OP was (at worst) saying that cooking is menial. Not a comment about a person, and not a particularly negative descriptor. The person I replied to then indirectly called him lazy and made an insulting bad-faith assumption about how OP spends his time. The reply is pretty clearly an ad hominem.

I did not imply anything about how OP spends their time. I was referring to how I used to spend my time, which is much more clearly implied in that I refer to my own history of bad habits.

The evidence is massive and drastic that the eating habits of the majority of Americans are killing us. Maybe approaching 50 is making me care less about insulting sensitive internet randos than with helping people understand the consequences of poor eating habits and the fairly simple way one can change. Sorry for caring.

Not being willing to feed your sole human body properly is the definition of lazy in my opinion. It's purely an opinion, as is the opinion that doing so is menial, so there's no "backing up the claim". If someone is insulted by my belief that humans should be willing to spend time feeding themselves, so be it. My point is to encourage healthy behavior, not to insult.

Some meals are so easy to cook that you could actually watch the TV while cooking, only looking away for a few moments, usually while cutting ingredients. (Then there are other meals where such approach would most likely result in burning the meal.)

Yep. I often listen to audiobooks while cooking - ideal for shutting down after work.