Why You Shouldn’t Take Cooking Advice From the Pros

Go to your local bookstore and you’ll find shelves overflowing with cookbooks.

Beginner cookbooks! Thai cookbooks! Paleo cookbooks!

The list goes on and on.

It’d be tempting to say that it’s easier than ever to learn how to cook today. In addition to all the cookbooks lining the shelves of bookstores, TV stations are flooding the airwaves with cooking reality shows and celebrity chefs.

But I’d argue that it isn’t.

It’s harder to learn how to cook now than ever before, and it’s because, not despite of the excessive focus on cooking in our modern culture.

Learning how to cook from pro chefs is like learning how to have sex from porn stars.

Will you get something out of it? Sure. But the pros just don’t know what it’s like for cooking to just be a part of your life rather than its main focus.

Food preparation used to be an essential life skill passed on through generations in people’s homes. Now it’s a mystical art that confounds even the most experienced learners.

It’s time to change that.

The Most Important Development In Cooking (Ever)

“The four men came back to their home early with an eviscerated hog slung across their shoulders.

They quickly got to work starting a fire and dismembering the carcass into smaller pieces that they would throw on the hot coals.

After nearly a week of eating only insects and small roots, their tribe would eat well tonight.”

Humans tamed fire as a way of providing light and warmth, but it was only a matter of time before they discovered an even more revolutionary purpose for it: cooking.

The early humans that cooked their food found that it:

1. Helped keep foods safe for eating for longer
2. Reduced the amount of energy required for digestion
3. Made the food tastier

 

For eons afterwards, cooking would go on in the following fashion: those who were able to would hunt animals and gather plants during the day, and others back at camp would cook these foods up to share with the tribe.

Why Rich People Ruined Food For the Rest of Us

With the advent of agriculture, our approach to cooking made massive leaps forward.

Since we no longer had to roam around looking for food, humans planted their roots and became more or less sedentary.

Sure, people would still do some hunting and gathering, but the ability to raise livestock and grow produce meant that we more or less stayed still.

And since we no longer had to carry all our kitchen equipment with us, we were able to develop heavier, more unwieldy, and just plain useful pieces of kitchen gear (such as ovens).

It was also at this time that our cultures became more heierarchical, with a large span of wealth between the rich and the poor.

And since the wealthy didn’t want to prepare their own food, there was now a need for professional chefs–people who prepared others’ food for a living.

It was during this time that cooking became less of a necessity and more an elaborate work of art.

Professional chefs toiled away with exotic ingredients, complex techniques, and fancy equipment to create bona fide cuisine for the first time.

It was at this point that cooking was first elevated to the artist’s domain.

The Home Cooking Renaissance

For a long, long time, the rich ate food prepared by artisans and the poor ate, well, peasant food.

But the industrial revolution (amongst other events) helped redistribute wealth and most of the peasants became at least moderately wealthy.

All of a sudden, haute cuisine became more democratized. It was the golden age of home cooking.

All of a sudden, food became less of a scarce resource than a commodity to be picked up from the store. “Seasonal” ingredients were suddenly available year round. And home cooking became the domain of every household.

Everyone knew how to cook tasty, healthy food. And everyone passed it down the generations.

But like all good things, it came to an inevitable end.

The Ignominious Death of Home Cooking

In the past few decades, we have become busier and busier.

Since humans tamed fire until just the past few decades, there’s always been at least one person in our “tribe” who stayed behind and took it upon them to cook for everyone else.

Then we started living in smaller and smaller “tribes,” until it was just our immediate family. Or even just ourselves.

As this went on, it became more and more difficult to retain our ancient knowledge of cooking.

Our wives and mothers were often expected to cook all our food for us, but recent cultural shifts have empowered women to do what they want with their lives, which, as it happens, rarely is limited to the stereotype of “barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.”

And while women everywhere should be commended for going out into the world in a way that was previously unavailable to them, we guys deserve our fair share of criticism for failing to step up and fill in with more “domestic” duties such as cooking.

Most of us now live better than the rich aristocracy that originally gave rise to the art of cooking, but few of us have anyone to fill the role of personal chef anymore.

Enter the processed food industry.

While few of us have the ability to toil away all day long preparing food, even fewer are willing (or able) to pay someone else to cook for them.

It is from these circumstances that the processed food industry has arisen (and thrived).

Don’t want to cook? No problem. There’s a fix for that. You can now get all of your calories from easy-to-reheat microwaveable dishes.

Since we no longer need to cook, very few of us bother to try. And like an ancient language, we are slowly forgetting how to use it.

But a small minority are trying to keep this knowledge alive.

• We realize that home cooked meals always taste much better than the processed versions.
• We acknowledge that most of our most common health problems are brought on by poor diets, and that focusing on real food will give us better results than focusing on fad diets.
• We know that our grandmothers made excellent food without having a ton of equipment or fancy ingredients.
• We know that there are a few easy tricks we can learn from pro chefs to take our meals to the next level without getting too finicky.
• We realize that a scientific approach to cooking can give us more consistently excellent results, and will help debunk longstanding old wives’ tales that persist in the kitchen.

Despite all the pressures, some of us want to learn to cook. But how do we if we can no longer learn from the elders in our families and tribes?”

Loud Celebrity Chefs (and Their Lousy Cookbooks)

Most celebrity chefs have given us completely unrealistic ideas of what home cooking should be like.

Just like food companies have to put more and more bizarre ingredients in their products to grab our attention and get us addicted, most celebrity chefs keep us coming back with their version of fancy-pants restaurant food.

Sure, it all looks so purdy, but the reality is no one eats at home like that all the time.

Anthony Bourdain (one of the good guys, as far as I’m concerned) wrote in his fantastic book Kitchen Confidential:

“Unless you’re one of us already, you’ll probably never cook like a professional. And that’s okay. On my day off, I rarely want to eat restaurant food… What I want to eat is home cooking, somebody’s anybody’s – mother’s or grandmother’s food.”

Like it or not, most of us think that “knowing how to cook” means “knowing how to cook like your favorite Food Network show host.”

We sit and watch them whip up a storm in the kitchen, marveling at their ability to throw together epic meals in 30 minutes or less.

We buy their cookbooks, hoping that one day we’ll be able to replicate their dishes, only to put it back on the bookshelf to collect dust after four weeks.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that, in this day and age, there are still highly visible role models that people can look up to that are inspiring people to learn how to cook, I just wish that they would focus more on home cooked food rather than restaurant food.

• Restaurant food requires exotic ingredients, expensive equipment, and difficult techniques that are not available to the home cook.
• Home cooking, on the other hand, uses simple ingredients, basic equipment, and a few fundamental skills that can be used by anyone.

Not everyone can be a successful chef, but everyone can be a successful home cook.

Cook Like Grandma (with a Modern Twist)

Every year, 25 languages die.

One of the most important human tools is verbal communication, but these ancient arts are slowly being lost to time.

Cooking, another fundamental tool, is slowly becoming ancient knowledge as we move to a diet composed more and more of heavily-processed ready-to-eat foods.

We no longer learn from our mothers and grandmothers how to prepare delicious and fulfilling food. Instead we look to professional chefs, who have no idea what it’s like trying to become a successful home cook.

It’s time for a revolution.

Instead of trying to learn how to cook from encyclopedic (and overwhelming) resources while we unfavorably compare ourselves to celebrity chefs, why don’t we have the resources to learn how to cook at home the way we’d learn any other subject?

In the near future, we will learn basic techniques one by one, from getting over our fears of cooking to making bread from homemade sourdough starters, collecting new and useful information.

• We will use these skills to create meals ourselves, bringing theory into practice.
• We will interact with others online, sharing fears and frustrations and helping each other meet whatever challenges may come up.
• We will take what we learn to become expert home cooks, just like our great-great grandparents were, and we will help others out on their journey.
• We will learn from science how best to prepare food for taste, texture, and safety. We will learn from psychology how to get over the mental blocks we put in our way to learning how to cook. And yes, we will steal a few tricks from the pros. The ones that can be easily replicated in the home kitchen to take your food to the next level.

Although professional chefs have done much to turn food into an art form, trying to learn how to fit a home cooked meal into your busy life isn’t one of them.

It’s far better to learn from the growing Kitchen Hacking movement, which I, for one, am truly excited to see grow.

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