Why Cooking Is the Best: Part Eight

Highly processed foods are only necessary if you don’t cook. As I’ve said, the overarching appeal of fast food, frozen dinners, and meals in a can is their convenience. Some people would say it’s their taste. There’s no accounting for that, though these tastes are learned; we’re not born craving Ho Hos.

But when you start cooking, you stop relying on these foods. If you can make spaghetti, there’s no need for SpaghettiOs. If you can cook chicken, the nugget becomes obsolete. I’ll say it again: Cooking is a process, one that takes time and effort. It also requires energy. But much of that is human energy, the kind that doesn’t deplete the environment. Our monoculture-weighted food chain has become extremely efficient at consuming the kind of energy that does. As have we. Which hardly matters at this point; through our choices, we have the power to break the cycle. In a very real way, replacing processed foods with the process of cooking food ourselves leads to both energy conservation and energy independence.