Were you to list the most important life giving practices eating will be right there at the top with breathing. No matter who you are, your body is a closed system that needs energetic input to be able to give any kind of output. Hunger is our collective game and just as each one of us breaths in his/her own oxygen being able to make a few basic meals is at the same level of importance but has somehow fallen out of focus.

Every previous generation in human history had been taught to fend from themselves. The kids you cut up food for now would a few hundred years ago have at their age been perfectly capable of surviving in the woods with the skills of hunting, gathering and preparing food. But as we so proudly shift our focus to the arrogance of being human and focus our energy on that which separates us from other species food has become fetishized or convenient with the middle ground of common sense shrinking rapidly. It is the benefit of having a well-developed society that you don’t have to go rummage through the forest to find mushrooms or hide in the bushes to catch a bore. You can find all of this on the shelves of the supermarket, but at the same time you’ve been lulled into culinary learnt helplessness by advertisers flattering your busyness and importance of your time They created a problem of not having enough time to cook and solved it for you by offering you ready made highly processed food. Convenience and not health is the new staple of food consumption – 1 minute microwave meals, take outs, deliveries… In the media food is pushed to a realm of fetish by an influx of cooking shows depicting godlike artists preparing meals you’d never be able to make without dedicating your life to this skill level, so you start to believe that food preparation is something better left to the professionals and that our job is to photograph it for Instagram afterwards. You’ll watch hours of cooking shows and then say you have no time to cook and order take out?

It is not that hard to make a home cooked meal, it doesn’t need to be presented in absurd ways like a soup cone dipped in duck tears with just a hint of parsley. You can boil some pasta, you can steam some vegetables, you can put ingredients into a pot and go about your business while you make that broth. It is not that hard, it is not a fetishized commodity to be looked it, it’s sustenance. You can have a natural affinity towards cooking or suck at it just as easily as you can in anything else, but doing it badly is still better than not at all.

Any grown person should be able to make the decision on what they put into their body and the surest thing to know is to cooks from scratch. Kudos to you on being busy but this still doesn’t mean you can’t boil an egg. Each month you’ll get a new body as old cells die and new are created and it will be built from the materials you gave it to work with. If you’re looking to boost your life quality, general health and wellbeing one of the simplest and most effective ways is to change your eating habits. It might not be possible most days to put on a 5 course meal but if you’re saying you don’t have time to boil some rice, well that is just a lie. The world will not stop if you decide to take half an hour to make a home cooked meal for you and your family. If it seems as it will, maybe it’s time to reconsider the life schedule you’ve made.