[wkat4242]

This. I absolutely hate cooking. With a passion. I don't want to spend time on it.

I wish it was possible to buy decent home cooked food for a reasonable fee :(

We can outsource pretty much everything else that's a chore. I drop my washing in a bag to be ready for a tenner tomorrow. Groceries can be delivered for cheap.

But delivered or takeaway food is generally very expensive and not very healthy. It's still viewed as a luxury.

There's just no benefit to cooking for a single person and I just hate doing it so much. So I get implements that make cleanup as simple as possible. Like the non-stick pans.

It's very different for someone who would view coming as a hobby and takes pride in it.

[teekert]

Idk to me this sounds like: I hate washing myself or I hate going to the bathroom. Maybe it’s a cultural thing but adults just need to be able to cook in my society. No place for hefty emotions. Just a fact of life.

It might be nice to live in a society where not cooking is possible. Probably less healthy though, you have different incentives than people making your food. (Taste [salt levels] and “adictiveness” vs healthy and nutritious).

Cooking is a skill, it takes practices and you have to develop some dexterity. But I usually enjoy it now.

I have to admit I never really cooked extensively for 1 person. I imagine I’d use the freezer a lot for lasagnas and sauces etc.

Check out “Nat’s what I reckon”.

[jdietrich]

>Maybe it’s a cultural thing but adults just need to be able to cook in my society. No place for hefty emotions. Just a fact of life.

I have an impaired sense of smell, as do 20% of the adult population. Most foods are utterly bland or actively repulsive to me. Sweet tastes are mildly pleasant, but otherwise I do not enjoy eating, I just do it to avoid hunger. I maintain a BMI of 19, but only because I actively monitor my food intake to avoid becoming clinically underweight.

Cooking is a chore that I will perform in the most perfunctory way possible in order to keep myself alive, but it is also something I will avoid wherever possible. Any effort I might put into making a delicious meal is wasted on me, because I don't have the sensory apparatus to perceive deliciousness.

From my perspective, the world seems almost pathologically obsessed with food. People often struggle to understand my complete indifference to food ("surely there must be some foods you enjoy"), but I struggle to understand how vast numbers of people eat so much that they become disabled and die prematurely. I can only make sense of it through the lens of addiction, which would raise all sorts of questions about the way in which we think talk about food versus other addictive substances.

My experience is obviously atypical (although not as uncommon as you might imagine), but I can't help thinking that the rest of you would be better off if you took a slightly more functional and utilitarian approach to eating. Obviously you can't just all pretend that you don't enjoy eating, but maybe you could all spend a bit less time talking and thinking about food?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15064632/

[wkat4242]

I don't agree. I lived in Thailand where it's common to just buy a plastic bag of food from a street vendor. Most houses apparently don't even have full kitchens.

[redwall_hp]

People in ancient Pompeii didn't either. They bought bread from bakers, or paid for time in public ovens, and bought premade food from pubs or other vendors. Preserved homes very clearly did not typically have the means to prepare food.

It's a statement kind of like insisting that everyone should know how to farm or do animal husbandry, when those were specialist jobs (sometimes serfs' jobs...) since time immemorial. Humans built cities millennia ago and lived in semi-specialized social groups before that.

The outmoded self-sufficiency obsession is very culturally American, due to its relatively recent status as a more or less agrarian colony.

[teekert]

Yeah I loved that about Thailand, I’d eat small things all day from street vendors. Good stuff.

[NoboruWataya]

I would say paying a tenner to wash a bag of clothes is luxury pricing, it's far more expensive than sticking it in the washing machine. It wouldn't surprise me if it was the same factor more expensive as takeaway vs cooking, and cooking is more laborious.

I do agree that it's annoying cooking as a single person though. Batch cooking and freezing can help.

[Bjartr]

I've heard of people finding a large family (through Craigslist or something) that's already making many servings for every meal, often days ahead, and paying them to make one more serving and freeze and deliver it on a weekly basis.

[Closi]

> I wish it was possible to buy decent home cooked food for a reasonable fee :(

I mean that’s pretty much what supermarkets sell right? Ready meals that can be heated, which are effectively cooked the same way as at the home but just on an industrial scale. Or pasta that’s pre-made and pre-filled and you just have to heat and add some sauce that’s already pre-made.

Im in the UK where we have services like Cook that are good quality meals you can heat up.

[pixl97]

There is still a trade off here. Typically pre-made at industrial scale is looking for 'cheats' they can use to increase transportability and shelf life of food before it's served. It is not common it means the quality of 'decent home cooked' food.

There are made at store foods like you're talking about, but quite often they are 2-3x the cost of the ingredients.

[Closi]

Shelf life can also be improved by freezing rather than other techniques (as is the case with Cook).

[wkat4242]

Those ready meals are full of salts to preserve them. And not very nutritional.

[doublerabbit]

With the added bucket-load of sugar to ensure the taste meets the standard of those without any taste buds.

[mrighele]

I like cooking, but I don't want to take care of the small details, so I just get a non-stick pan and cook what I like with it.

(Similarly, I like programming, but that doesn't mean I enjoy taking care of all the mallocs/free that a C program requires, I just use a language with a GC)