To stay healthy, cook your food. And, oh, use your inner microbes!

It was the tight budget in a foreign land that motivated me to start cooking.  The Sri Lankan roommate was in his fifth year of life in the US and he had a pretty good grasp of groceries and fast cooking.  The first year was a blur, as far as cooking went.

Year two, more budget issues but a little more experience in the kitchen.  It has been a slow and steady progress since then.  Now, comfort in the kitchen coupled with budgetary constraints of a different kind mean that I cook and bake a lot more than what I would have ever imagined. 

But, when I really feel cooking to be a chore, I will now remember to tell myself, “Suck it up, buttercup.”  The dirty secret, the author notes, is:

When you have no choice but to cook for yourself every single day, no matter what, it is not a fun, gratifying adventure. It is a chore. On many days, it kind of sucks.

Yep. A chore to shop. A chore it is to cut, chop, dice, and season the food. And then to wash and clean. Empty the trash.

A long time ago, when I was a kid, I asked my mother whether she felt shortchanged about having to work all seven days of the week in her role as a home-maker--"housewife," as they were referred to then--in contrast to father who got time off his work.  She simply answered that everybody has a certain role and she was doing hers.  Much later in life I found her response echoing in Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players."

So, yes, we do what we do in the kitchen.

We certainly don't want to forget that there is a lot more to cooking and eating than it merely being a response to budget constraints, argues this Scientific American piece:. 

For one, our bodies seem to expend different quantities of energy to deal with different kinds of food (the energy expended produces heat and so is referred to by scientists as “diet-induced thermogensis”); some foods require us to do more work than others. Proteins can require ten to twenty times as much heat-energy to digest as fats, but the loss of calories as heat energy is not accounted for at all on packaging.
For another, foods differ in how and where they are digested in our guts. Some foods such as honey are so readily used that our digestive system is really not even put to good use. They are absorbed in our small intestines; game mostly over. More complex foods, on the other hand, such as cassava or almonds, have to travel to the colon where they meet up with the largest concentrations of our little friends, the microbes. 

 So, there is food, and then there is food.  Choose wisely, grasshopper!

It is a testament to human ingenuity that we have now figured out how to provide as many calories as possible in our foods. We don’t even really need for our intestines to do much work, our bacteria either, or even our teeth for that matter. Our modern diets are a measure of our evolutionary success, or at least they would be from the perspective of our paleo ancestors who needed and wanted excess calories. They are not successes from our modern perspective. We now have too many calories and too many of those calories are of low quality. One in three Americans is now obese. Over the last thirty years the number of calories we eat has increased, but so has the number of those calories that come from highly processed foods. In this light, we would do well to eat fewer processed foods and more raw ones.

Sounds good.  But, dammit, I ended up slicing my thumb while working some wonderfully fresh and tender green beans!