My grandmother cooked daily and taught her kids to cook. My mother cooked weekly and taught us to use the microwave. Sure anyone can learn to cook, just like anyone can learn to play the piano, but it requires time, money, dedication, and the push to get started. It’s much easier if you were taught some of the basics as a kid, or had an example in your life.

It still baffles me that people compare cooking to playing an instrument. It really is not that difficult to cook, depending on what it is. Do people know how to make schnitzel (breadcrumbed meat)? Make fries? Make rice? Make boiled potatoes? Or are those things difficult as well? Making a stew out of legumes is not that difficult either. Boil your legumes, then mix eggs, flour, and paprika together, put it in oil, heat it up for a few seconds, then pour everything into the water you are boiling your legumes in. Put some herbs to your liking. That is literally it. Healthy, delicious stew of any legumes.

Agreed. The analogies to playing a musical instrument or speaking a foreign language are pretty silly.

Cooking (provided you have access to some simple cookware) is literally printing out the recipe and FOLLOWING THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS. If that’s beyond someone’s abilities then I weep for the general state of mankind.

You can get good enough cookware for the price of a couple of McDonald's meals too. We don't all need $100 pots and pans. I feel like the people arguing that cooking is a giant obstacle can't be doing it in good faith. Watch a YouTube video and throw a couple of eggs in a $10 pan already.

This.

If someone can afford fast food, they can afford enough utensils or equipments, too.

As I said, I come from a poor family and we only went to the McDonalds to get fast food when I was sick (because I craved it), so very rarely. Fast food was for special occasions due to its high price as opposed to cooking at home, as a poor family.

"I feel like the people arguing that cooking is a giant obstacle can't be doing it in good faith. "

I am one of those people and I am arguing in good faith. I have seen it with my own eyes.

It is not "just" skills or "just" kitchen or "just" utensils or "just" unfamiliarity with the basics or "just" being tired after getting home late (poor people often work bad schedules). It is a bit of everything, and the resulting complex is hard to disentangle.

On a similar note, have you never seen, e.g., obese people who never exercise? It is again a bit of everything. They are not used to it, they feel bad when starting, they can easily overdo it, they feel ashamed going into a gym etc. All this summed together results in avoidant behavior, even though no single reason dominates it.

Yes, all those obstacles can be overcome, but we shouldn't expect everyone to just simply leap over them. All humans aren't built this way. If they were, humanity as a whole would look a lot different than it does.

My point was that if a person learns to cook early in life, they will consider it more natural and most of those obstacles will be easier to overcome for them. They will have all the circuits wired in, so to say.

I have a similar experience when exercising. I was never obese, but my mother never exercised. Simply never. (Ironically, at 74, she is in perfect health.) And thus, I didn't understand how exercise even makes sense as a kid. I had to learn it for years. It is hard to describe how challenging is it to adjust your mindset and rhythm of life to something that was completely alien to you in your first 20 years of life, especially if that activity is optional and there is no external pressure. You can do it, but various relapses and "falling off the wagon" are way more frequent than if that activity is second nature to you.

If we want to fix things on societal level, we must be realistic. Recipes like "just do X", where X is something nontrivial, feel good and easy (especially to doers of X), but they don't have a good track record in actually achieving society-wide changes. They work for some individuals, but they have a scaling problem.

Maintaining a fast food habit is both expensive and non-trivial. For the people who have to drive to get their fast food, at least you know they are capable of learning something more complex than cooking.

OK, so how do you explain that people don't cook, especially the ones who are relatively poor and could save some money doing so?

I have been engaging in this thread for a day now and harvesting downvotes. I would certainly love to see some competing theories and dig into them instead.

I mean, how do we explain the fact that in the US homeless people have access to expensive drugs? :P

> Cooking (provided you have access to some simple cookware) is literally printing out the recipe and FOLLOWING THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS. If that’s beyond someone’s abilities then I weep for the general state of mankind.

I mean, if you don't understand how badly the US educational system is failing people then I don't know what you expect. There are a large amount and growing amount of people that are barely literate and can only follow basic instructions. This is by design because we're starving our educational systems and creating a two-tiered society where people either receive private education or no education at all. It should come at zero surprise that people can't cook because they were never taught how to cook nor how to even learn and integrate that knowledge.

My parents for example were fishermen, neither of them are functionally able to cook anything beyond tossing some meat in a crockpot and some rice in a rice cooker. Everything I know about cooking was shit I had to pick up on my own and it's only because I'm both literate and computer savvy that I can grasp and integrate these things smoothly.

While the US education system is plenty bad, I expect that a substantial number of people who can't/don't cook are not held back due to illiteracy. To be fair, this thread seems to be discussing recipes and dishes, but even "tossing some meat in a crockpot and some rice in a rice cooker" is an improvement from ordering fast food.

It's not difficult per se, but you can't throw anyone into a kitchen and expect food to be made as a result. You still need to be taught to some extent. The bar is a lot lower than playing an instrument or many other things, but there's still a bar below which (edible) food will not be made. If you've never been taught and never went out of your way to learn, you won't know how to.

Some people get out of school not being able to read and write, at least to any meaningful degree. The fact that some people get out of school not being able to cook thus shouldn't be surprising.

Is the US education system really this bad?

The same problem is present in other parts of the world, even in Europe, although I believe not to the same extent.

I got down-voted, which is odd, because I truly have not encountered anyone here in Hungary who do not know how to read nor write. The only demographic that may difficulties with that are gypsies because they typically do not go to school.

Additionally, is it not common knowledge the US education system is bad?

Might be an American in denial.

The 'meaningful' part of my original comment is carrying a lot of weight there. Most people are literate in the literal sense of that word, but I went to class with people who have not read a written work longer than five pages sine they went out of school, and I would not trust them to read an even vaguely complicated instruction manual without me explaining something to them. They are not literate in any meaningful sense of that word. They barely knew how to read when we took our final exams, but they did pass, since no-one wants to deal with the trouble of actually teaching them now. They're good people. The schools just failed them.

I could barely write when I got out school, in the sense that I couldn't read my own handwriting. I had to be taught anew when I learned a language that uses a different script, and that practice made my normal handwriting 10 times better.

And this is before you get into people who for most intents and purposes apparently can read, but their brain grinds to a halt when a computer requires them to do that very same activity and act accordingly. I'm not sure of those people have a similar problem of functional illiteracy, or if it's a problem of a different kind, but it sure is real and sure keeps happening.

You could open a trendy restaurant in SV called 'Soup Kitchen' serving various stews and goulashes and I am confident it would do very well.

I am confident in this, too. My Hispanic girlfriend made goulash for the first time in her life and it was delicious! She used Hungarian paprika. :)

For someone raised around music, starting a new instrument might not sound very challenging. You could get good at twinkle twinkle little star on the recorder in under an hour. Take carpentry as another example. It’s not hard. It’s not expensive to get into. But, if you never had someone in your life who was into it, then it just never occurs to you to try it.

It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P I have not cooked my entire life, for the most part, but when my situation requires me to cook, then I can. I find a relatively easy recipe and I just follow the instructions. It has worked out fine for me.

> Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know

Okay, the situation really is horrible then, wow.

> If I could learn it, so can anyone else.

More than a billion people have successfully learned to speak Chinese, some of them very stupid. Yet here I am, struggling to remember the hanzi and the tones.

Different skills take different amounts of time and parameters to master.

Comparing learning a language to watching a video or reading a recipe and spending a few weeks adding some oil and spices in a pot or pan is ridiculous.

Sorry, I wanted to sound edgier and made my point less clear! What I wanted to convey is, it's waaaaay easier to learn a skill when you've been exposed to it since you were a baby.

My mother and grandmother cooked, but I have never participated, I just ate the food. Does it count as exposure?

"It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P "

Well, the Neanderthals cooked, so it is not exactly a rocket engineering skill ... but it is probably acquired better from other people than alone, and equipment matters as well.

If you learn to cook from your mother in a well-equipped kitchen, you will probably enjoy the process a lot more than alone with Youtube in a cheaply rented flat with one pot, one dull knife and two dented plastic plates. And if people don't enjoy some learning process, they are much more likely to drop out and resign. Especially if fast food alternatives lurk at them from their smartphones.

The best way to start cooking is probably with a knife, cutting board, an 8" or 10" skillet, and a small saucepan (i.e. little soup pot). There are pans that can work as the last two, but it helps to be able to have two pans at hand, e.g. for making rice while cooking the protein and/or vegetables, even if all you have is a single burner. And none have to be fancy. A cheap soft wood cutting board helps your cheap knife stay sharper for longer.

Outside baking, that's basically all you need, at least if you're alone. Cooking for two or especially a family is when you need more equipment as time savers and for variability, e.g. mandolin, pressure cooker, etc.

I'd venture to say this is how many people have learned to cook, and even how many avid cookers continue to cook.

If you're starting out, canned food and pasta is definitely your friend, not to mention cheap. You can start to learn to cook by boiling a pot of water for your instant Ramen, and frying an egg to toss into the bowl. Or just soft boil an egg in the boiling water and set side before doing the Ramen in the same water. Building meals around something packaged and precooked is useful and can help save money (outside beans and rice, fresh ingredients are sadly often more expensive than what you can cobble together from pantry staples).

I come from a very poor family, and I am Eastern European... so we had very "shitty" equipments. We peeled our potatoes using a knife, too. I wonder how foreign it is to others.

I have never learned to cook from anyone. I just read the recipes and/or watch some videos and that is literally it. My kitchen is not as equipped as it is in rich households.

Ordering food is ideal, but super expensive, so I personally cannot afford to do that.

Aren't you Martin Janiczek? Bro, if true, you're not helping our collective effort to resurrect "Central Europe" in colloquial use :)

We had a weird assortment of equipment as well, some dating back to Masaryk, but it was usually durable and reliable. That is why we also kept it; late stage Communism was terrible at producing durable consumer goods, while old stuff lasted for decades.

I usually refer to it as Central Europe but people have difficulties with it, just like with cooking easy food. :P

I'm male, and I was never taught to cook nor prepare a meal. And I do not like cooking one little bit yet I can prepare a meal that all but the most fussy would eat. And I'm talking about a meal with multiple parts—meat, three vegetables with condiments, and bread etc. then say finishing with a desert.

Basic cooking is profoundly easy, and for most it's instinctive, after all one has to eat, so there's incentive. In fact I have never knowing met anyone who couldn't prepare a basic meal that would not at least sustain them and other members of a family. It's true I've met people whose food preparation leaves much to be desired and I'd prefer to avoid their cooking but the food they prepared was definitely edible.

"You seem to take the ability of people to cook for granted."

Right, I've lived my whole life in a world where everyone I know takes one's ability to prepare a basic meal for granted, it's something that's not even contemplated it's so elementary. In fact, when reading your comment my initial reaction was as this isn't April 1st he must be winding us up for the sake of argument.

If what what you say is true and there are significant numbers of people who can't cook then to me this is a startling revelation. Similarly, I'd not previously heard of Jamie Oliver's questioning of school kids and revealing their ignorance of food types but that's not surprising given that cooking programs bore me to tears. That said, the first thing I'd no doubt agree with Oliver about is that this ignorance is truly shocking, and second we'd be questioning how did we arrive at this disgraceful situation when it would have been inconceivable several generations ago.

How can someone not pick up the basics of food preparation after seeing it done several times? Even if like me one doesn't like cooking, at three meals a day it's hard to completely avoid watching those who are preparing one's food—so the normal human gets lots of experience even if they only see food preparation infrequently.

Even with my disinterest in cooking I picked the skill up by simply being around the kitchen at meal times. By age 10 I could easily prepare a decent meal, that's just how it was for the average person.

This failure to be able to name basics is actually kinda terrifying…