Why Cooking for Other People is Beneficial

Benefits of Home Cooking and Preparing Food for Others

The hectic pace of life for many people means finding time to cook may seem like a luxury rather than an essential part of our lives. The process of planning meals, selecting and finding ingredients, learning cooking skills, and making food means that the urge to order fast food or reach for the nearest microwave meal is understandable.

While the drive to achieve a healthy lifestyle has led to a rise in easy recipes as busy people try to benefits of homemade cooking into their professional lives, it also helps to recognize the huge benefits that taking time to cook with and for others may have on our mental and physical well-being. In fact, cooking can enhance our physical and health while providing critical opportunities to connect with friends and loved ones as well as form new bonds.

Physical Health

The most direct upside to home cooking is the benefits that consciously thinking about what we eat has on our physical health. Restaurants often know that a key to making their food tasty is the addition of salt, sugar, fat, and additives which are often harmful to long-term health. Furthermore, food prepared through processes such as deep frying which is typically used by the culinary industry to quickly make tasty food, is often harmful to human health when consumed regularly or in large amounts.

Cooking at home provides a remedy to these challenges. The ability to select one’s own ingredients and the need to understand what goes into our food encourages us to eat healthier and make better decisions about the food that fuels us, making us physically and mentally healthier and less likely to suffer from chronic health conditions in the future.

Mindfulness and Mental Health

The very act of preparing our own food encourages us to think more consciously about our diets and health. It also slows down our day and causes us to engage more with the moment, rather than being caught up on the stresses of our last workday or the demands of upcoming projects.

This ability to focus on the moment is especially important in the face-paced, high distraction society of the twenty-first century, in which the demands of different parts of our lives combine with multi-purpose devices such as laptops and smartphones to constantly divide our attention and make it more difficult to harness our attention to important tasks. Cooking, which requires a high degree of attentiveness, teaches us to center our attention on a given task, encouraging mindfulness and engagement.

Cooking can also be an introspective and almost meditative experience. This is because cooking involves all of our senses, and the food that we eat may evoke memories of other times we enjoyed the same dishes. Because of this, cooking can help us connect with our past, though of course not all memories are necessarily positive.

Psychologically, cooking at home, whether for ourselves also encourages the view that the people who are eating the food, whether ourselves or others are important and worthy of care. Involving children in this process also encourages them to think about health and food from a young age and also teaching them practical skills and boosting their confidence and self-reliance as they see the results of their hard work and can continuously improve with appropriate supervision.

It is important to remember that the psychological benefits of home cooking noted above are largely lost when we find ourselves multitasking as we prepare food. Taking the time to focus on and enjoy what we are doing is essential to reaping the psychological benefits surrounding the process of food preparation.

Connecting with Others

An aspect of cooking that is overlooked is the social benefits that often come with preparing food with and for other people. In our high-paced lives, taking twenty minutes to cook for others, gives us a chance to connect with the people who will later enjoy the food. When we cook for others, we are providing for one of the most basic human needs while the effort we put into making the food as tasty as possible can be experienced in the positive feedback we observe when others enjoy our cooking.

Since the beginning of human history, eating has been a communal activity in which the labor of our everyday life ceases and we take time to socialize and connect with others. However, in the age of microwave dinners and fast food, preparing quality food for others and involving friends and loved ones in the process of preparing and eating food, takes the activities surrounding food back to their roots as fundamentally social activities.

Furthermore, the process of connecting with others through food can be experienced even when those who will later enjoy the food are not present. The altruistic nature of sharing with and providing for others may evoke thoughts of compassion and caring for those individuals and enhance our sense of closeness with them.

Why it Pays to Eat Well

Cooking at home and especially for others can create a compound effect in which our physical, mental and social health are enhanced, leaving us feeling healthier and more fulfilled. While the temptation may often be to rely on quick solutions such as ordering in or fast food, continued reliance on food that is highly available but of poor quality can lead to a downward spiral in which we feel physically unhealthy, mentally unhappy, and socially isolated. Cooking at home and involving others in preparation and consumption can have positive effects not only for ourselves but for our families and friends who partake in the process.

Finally, while it may take time to learn the skills necessary to cook well, the resources necessary to do so have never been more available to the public. The internet offers a plethora of instructional videos, recipes, and advice from a range of health professionals such as nutritionists, psychologists, and physicians on how to incorporate cooking and eating into a healthy lifestyle. The proven benefits of preparing and eating food with others combined with the availability of helpful resources instructing us in how to do so mean there has never been a better time to incorporate home cooking into your lifestyle.