[joshocar]

I also think there is an education gap. People grow up eating processed food and don't learn to cook. People often try to cook, but online recipes are not really teaching you anything and are often far more work than they need to be or turn out bad, so people think or learn that cooking a meal takes a long time, is a lot of work, and doesn't taste as good. Cooking becomes the exception rather than the norm.

In reality you can have a piece of salmon, with a veggie and side in ~20m with 2m of prep and 2m of cleanup. An online recipe would have you cooking down a sauce, making a complicated side, and use some random ingredient that you need to buy for that one meal.

[nottorp]

I guess most online recipes assume you're cooking for "special occasions".

I can buy a bag of frozen assorted veggies and a few pieces of frozen salmon in the store across the street, throw them 15 min into a pan and be done. It's mostly what I feed on.

Not in the US though.

[kbelder]

I haven't been in a place in the US where you can't easily do that, and I don't live in a particularly urban environment.

[atomicnumber3]

I think the main problem with online recipes is that there's a lot of stuff that "cooks" and "people who cook" learn that carries over VERY STRONGLY from dish to dish that is just totally absent from online tutorials. Things like what done (but not dried out) chicken looks like, and how to position chicken in a pan so the thicker parts get more heat, and why your chicken went right from "looks plain" to burned with no maillard reaction.

I think foods/culinary courses should be mandatory in high school. I took one as an elective, expecting it to be a blow-off class, but I ended up being shocked by how much I - honor student and all that - didn't know about browning hamburger, much less actual cooking. I ended up taking the subsequent 3 classes in the "foods" line.

[S_Bear]

For all the effort we put into science education, cooking is applied science we do every day. We should start in elementary school and keep at it through high school, in my opinion.