The life-long benefits of learning proper cooking in school (and why it should be mandatory)

I personally believe self-fulfillment and self-knowledge is impossible on an empty stomach.

That being said, I'm no grand chef or glutton, I practice cooking as a hobby and passion and found so much about the world and myself and those around me by doing so, way more than I was taught in psychology class for example. 

There was a video on youtube I saw once where they said In Chinese saying good morning literally translates to "Have you eaten?"

At first I didn't really understand what they mean by that because I believed it totally inappropriate. However, the reasoning was that once your stomach is full, only then can you can engage in meaningful conversation or even philosophical debate, otherwise you're a somewhat feral animal(which is relatively true, I can’t be reasoned with on an empty stomach and I know plenty others just like me). I have no clue if this video is based on facts or it's just a nice story, but the point remains and it’s a very good one.

Depending on where you went to school you may or may not have had some nutrition classes & all that comes with them but I for one was just stuffed with math, biology, chemistry, science and most left-brain predominant activities. It was considered a very good choice for the future of the child. Every mother wanted her kid to be the next Einstein which is of course not only ridiculous and unrealistic but downright foolish. 

Luckily though, after school and college I discovered that cooking is something very useful in increasing my knowledge of plants/meats/spices and manifesting a new unknown side of my creativity. 

I discovered how important it is to know what you're eating, and also how important it is to cook it yourself, to put your energy and dedication into your creation and to have it admired and enjoyed by other people. 

Coming from a technical background I wanted to call every recipe "inspiration" and every culinary axiom "suggestion". Since culinary art includes the word (and thus concept) of art, I find blindly following recipes to be close to shooting oneself in the foot. 

--- It's culinary ART not culinary engineering. ---

Coming from a technical background, however, I also observed that this whole process basically breaks down into four major categories and had to classify them as follows:

1. Personal health – Knowing your food is knowing how it affects you in a very literal way.

2. Firsthand experience – It is a must for every domain. There is no theory here. There’s only practical discovery and experimentation. 

3. Creativity and self-expression: in a funny kind of way, it takes care of your physical hunger, and increases your intellectual hunger, making you crave more and more knowledge (and not only food-related) which is always a good thing especially in this day and age. 

4. Self-improvement – From interacting with others and getting feedback. A smile on somebody’s face thanking you for a dish of delicious food that you cooked for them is enough to fill an empty soul, for example. 

It basically started with me watching youtube videos of people cooking awesome looking food and it just went from there. My native language is not English so I had to learn a couple of names for common herbs and spices to name a few, which in turn led me to information regarding their properties, their health benefits, then I discovered various ways people from around the world prepare them, and then I thought I’d take the most useful and interesting tips and just put them together whenever I cook, whenever I eat. 

I come from a culture where as a child you’re just seated and served, you have to eat everything and nobody else is the wiser. I now tend to disagree with this approach. I encourage everybody to have as many options as possible and never settle with what they’re given. Knowing you need variety and knowing eating is not just stuffing things in your stomach is something that I wish everyone should know. 

So, regarding education, we all train to get jobs, to start businesses, to be the next big big-shots or to just live our lives in peace. Whatever the case may be, it’s usually a no-brainer that education is a means of putting the metaphorical bread on the metaphorical table. 

So why then do we not pay attention to the actual bread on the very literal table that we have to have every single day? For every single thing that we want to do, we need energy, we need food. One of the most important day-to-day life-long lifetime-impacting decision is overlooked as if being some free-time low priority hobby, sometimes even lowered to a degrading “kitchen-thing” status. The kitchen should be the crown of every home. It is here that you energize yourself every day. It is here that you (if you’re doing it right) prevent most problems with diseases throughout your life. My grandparents used to say a happy and healthy meal every day is like a brick in a wall. It can be a strong one, or it can crush itself under its own weight and ultimately crumble to dust.

Every single bad decision in food is having a lifetime impact on the body. And if you’re not educated, if you don’t know what’s in it, if you don’t know how it’s made, if you’ve never bothered, you will be always dependent on somebody else for it. Somebody that doesn’t know what you really need, somebody that doesn’t necessarily know your specific tastes in food, somebody that ultimately couldn’t care less and just wants your buck for the least amount of bang possible. And at this point you’re probably pretty much eating junk, because it’s fast, cheap, easy and you think it tastes good (which is an actual lie, your taste buds are being fooled by some clever but Machiavellian use of chemistry). And your fast food “chef” knows it, doesn’t care. 

You think it’s fast ? It’s not. Sure, you receive it every time in a couple of seconds to minutes at most, but how many more minutes will your future self waste on doctor appointments because your body just can’t take it anymore? 

Not cheap either. Not when you consider how much money medication for the conditions you’re creating right now will cost when your body can’t function properly because you never had the time and always picked the “cheap” way. In a sense, If you keep telling yourself that you don’t have time and you don’t have time, and you always don’t have time, you’ll eventually be right, and run out of it. So why not take time ? Sure, it doesn’t take 30 seconds like in a microwave, but you can practice and get better and faster and 30 minutes is reasonable. You don’t have to cook for the whole neighborhood . 

And here comes the need for having this in school. All those problems can be avoided and many good things can be created if kids just learn about the what/why/how of the culinary world. Not to mention that this actually helps make you independent. 

Knowledge is power, proper education is key. Bon Appétit.