The question of why one cooks generally seems to be quite the benign one. “Because you need to eat to survive… Because it is fun~!.. Because premade food is bad for you…” All these are the typical answers you’d expect to hear, and all of these answers are wonderful reasons! My reason is quite different. Certainly I cook because it is definitely fun and I would even argue my home made food tastes better than store prepared or fast food, however to say that those are the reasons I cook would be ignoring an aspect that is quite personal and intrinsic to me.
The primary cook of my family was my father. Typically the main dinner meals would be prepared by him, breaking the stereotype of the “woman in the kitchen”. As we would grow up, my siblings and I would be responsible for selecting the meals for the week and preparing them. I believe this was essential to teaching us how to be self reliant and financially aware of our eating habits. By actually selecting the ingredients, preparing them, and being conscious of how our food is made, this gave me a deeper appreciation for something that many take for granted. This was further driven home in my time as a Boy Scout, where if you didn’t prepare properly you could find yourself in the woods on a campout in some deep trouble. Thankfully none of the troop adults would let us under prepare that badly, instilling in us a sense of over estimating what we would need. From here I would also learn how to fish and prepare food that I gather from the land, further providing me with survival experience if a worst case scenario were to occur (Remember, we had a toilet paper crisis in 2020. If that can happen, McDonalds most certainly can end up closing on you one night).
These skills and lessons wouldn’t hit me immediately, however. In my early years, I always thought it was just a bother, a waste of time that others could take care of and that would never be important in life. That was until I was about 15 years old. It was around this time that my health took a nosedive, waking up with severe abdominal pains, barely being able to swallow even liquid foods without it getting stuck and puking, always feeling horrible on my insides. It took a bit of exploring with the doctors, but we found out that I had a case of GERD, chronic intestinal ulcers, and a weird situation where white blood cells were building up in my esophagus. The GERD was a known issue since I was a baby as I would frequently have stomach acid issues, however the other aspects were strange issues that didn’t really show up until my early teens. After consultations with gastroenterologists and allergologists, it was determined that the ulcers and white blood cell buildup in my esophagus were due to a reaction to something I was eating. This led to multiple allergy tests and elimination diets. From the allergy tests, we found that I had mild allergies to several foods (beef, pork, soy, corn, rice, rye, eggs, tomatoes, and lettuce). This coupled with my pre-known lethal allergies to peanuts, tree nuts, and shellfish created a major difficulty in eating for me. As a challenge, take a look at the ingredients of what you have in your home or when you go shopping, find something without soy in it. You will find it is quite difficult, especially when you look at fast food places and what is in their food there. Taking in to account all my newfound allergies, my old lifestyle of eating most anything I wanted became a thing of the past. Learning to cook my own food became mandatory.
At first it wasn’t as hard as one would expect. Having had experience in the scouts and general home responsibilities, making my own meals wasn’t something I was uncomfortable with. I also had experience reading ingredients and making sense of the strange chemical names on items to see what it really was and if it was something I could use or not. The struggle came in at around week 3 of the elimination diets. Variety is the spice of life and man cannot live on chicken alone. My foods were bland, getting quite tiresome, and leaving me craving other things. Learning to be creative with my cooking, exploring foreign recipes, trying new things, and diving in to the complex world of baking sweets became a soft passion of mine. While it was still quite a challenge, I eventually became proficient at it! While I am no Gordon Ramsey, if you were to throw a challenge to me I could more likely than not figure it out on the first or second try.
As a result, I find myself far more prepared for life in general. I don’t always adhere to my medically recommended diet, as typically I will now eat more freely and follow my diet when I find my gastro issues are flaring up. It isn’t the healthiest of life choices, but as a college student, you only have so many hours in the day and getting a burger at Stack in Esker tends to be more valuable than making it yourself and cleaning up the mess every time you’re hungry. But I will never deny that my preference will always go to making my own foods, as then I can be confident in what exactly is going in to my body.
Tanks for sharing
Good