Why I Hate Cooking Right Now
And maybe always did?
I started learning how to cook in college. I started with riffs on Annie’s Mac & Cheese, but quickly escalated to making elaborate pasta dishes and salads in a dorm kitchen while my then-boyfriend lived on pizza and ramen. Looking back, I’m struck by that disconnect: Why do some 19-year-olds start meal planning and grocery shopping every week, while other 19-year-olds eat like, well, college students? One reason is that only the 19-year-olds who have been socialized as female take it for granted that they’ll need to feed themselves and others for the rest of their lives. By the time that same boyfriend (later husband) and I graduated college and were living in teensy NYC studios, I was heaving my giant copy of Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything onto the vinyl countertops of our galley kitchens to make all sorts of things. I cooked dinner most nights after work in my 20s. And when we moved to a marginally bigger apartment, I’d make a ton of food whenever we hosted a party.
A lot of that party food happened with the help of my then-best friend Amy (who is still my best friend, and now a wildly successful food blogger). There was also a lot of wine at those parties, so I can’t remember all that much about what we cooked, but I do know we once hand-rolled cheesecake truffles for a New Year’s Eve party. This was the early 2000s, so there was also a lot of energy—and money we didn’t have!— directed towards farmer’s market shopping, Whole Foods, eating quinoa, and learning all the ways to make kale taste good. This was how I began to conceive of myself as a Very Good Cook. It was inextricably linked with that decade’s diet culture; with the need to eat in some “right” way; and with my expectations of myself as on a path towards a certain kind of marriage and motherhood.
20+ years later, I’m still a Very Good Cook. I can make a fairly involved stew, pasta sauce or salad dressing without a recipe. I know how to chop an onion with precision. I’ve made complicated things like Thai curry and chicken bastilla. I taught myself to grill last summer. I’ve hosted many a 20-person Christmas dinner. I bake really good chocolate chip cookies from scratch. I was the primary cook in my marriage, and I am now the only cook in my house.
But what I’ve slowly realized over the past year is that… I don’t like to cook. At least not right now. And it’s feeling entirely possible that I won’t ever like it again?