Why I Cook: A Treatise on Hobbies

I cook. I like to cook, I find the experience of cooking quite exhilarating and my family reaps the benefits of this particular fascination. Growing up one of my favorite shows were cooking shows, Good Eats, Emeril, Iron Chef, and my favorite neutral YouTube content is often cooking content. Cooking is often my neutral subject, when I want to discuss something deeply but am unsure of the politics of the people around me. This itself is a useful skill to being a social person.

Cooking is not apolitical, it is deeply involved with the politics and culture that brings about dishes, the politics and supply of food, but it's not usually explicitly partisan. It's also a subject a lot of people, even people who don't cook have an interest in. It's also fascinating. Dishes like Chicken Adobo, Coq Au Vin, Pot Roast; these are dishes with explicit histories, ones built as much from necessity as much as the desire for good tasting food. High flavor ingredients used to tendorize tough meat and cover up the foul taste of a fowl. There is also the mystery and history of techniques and ingredients. How did we discover the thickening and emulsifying power of eggs, or even yeast? These are questions I find myself musing over, and given some prompting I would tell you my favorite theories.

Take the Depression Era Water Pie. An explicit attempt to get a flavorful dessert out of so little, to derive a small amount of joy in a time in which such things were fleeting. There is a genius to the Water Pie, taking water and sugar and making an approximate to a custard pie out of it. This is a dish that could only come out of a time of shortage, but its techniques teach a lot about food. And while the Water Pie itself is not that good, it shows the kind of innovation that makes cooking so interesting to me. And you should find something that interests you like that.

I could go on all day about cooking science, history, and philosophy. I find cooking utterly fascinating, in my more pretentious moments I say it is what connects me to all humans in history, the desire to find good food well cooked likely goes back to the first monkey who found a poor animal that had drown in a hot spring, and ate its meat to find it tender an pliable. Cooking makes me feel connected to the actual world, it grounds me. And you should have something that does that for you as well.

A skill that not only is useful in a vacuum, but is utterly captivating to you to the point that you're willing put the time into mastering it. Not just this but a productive hobby, something that gives you something at the end of the experience. As much as I love gaming, for instance, all that I take with me when done are my ephemeral memories. Memories I love, and I will talk about endlessly. But cooking gives me a plate of food. Both absolutely nourishing in their own ways, but there is something to earning something physical for the labor.

It is my deep conviction that everybody needs a hobby that they are working toward mastering as the act of doing this not only makes you a more interesting, more complete person; but also gives you a place of grounding when things get tougher. Knowing that at the end of the day I will be in my Kitchen, cooking a meal for my family, using my knowledge, this centers me, no matter how hard or uncertain times get. And you have the assurance that if times get really hard, you have a skill that may be useful in a time beyond the normal.

Productive Hobbies are important for self-growth and self-assurance. They make you feel better to work on, and they give you something, even a bad something, in return as proof to the universe that your time was not wasted. That terrible mug you made attempting pottery, that oversalted meal, that uneven poorly shaped cutting board you made woodworking, that is proof that you spent time to make something from nothing. It is an accomplishment in the same breath that is a failure, and that sensation is something no human should go without.

So take the time, learn a new skill, adopt a hobby that you focus your off-time on. Not only will you have something in the end, the person you will be on the other side will be a person who you like more.

Jack Shawhan, AKA The Terrier, is a writer and internet funny person with occasional observations on politics, media, and modern life. If you would like to support his continued writing consider subscribing to his Ghost or if you would like to buy him a coffee send to his CashApp $JackShawhan.