But as long as it gets men to cook it's not all bad.
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
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As if cooking was so difficult... if you can follow a recipe.
There's two sides to that.
On one hand, you're right- someone who is motivated to learn can easily pick up cooking.
On the other hand, it's not just 'follow a recipe'. There's a lot of sub skills that someone who CAN cook can easily take for granted.
Let's say your recipe calls for one chopped onion. So the prospective cook goes to the grocery store... but there's lots of onions. There's white and yellow and sweet and there's little ones and big ones. Which one to get?
And then you have to chop it. Do you peel it first? How much to peel? Discard the ends or center or use them? What's the best way to chop it? How big of pieces do you want to end up with?
None of these are DIFFICULT things to find or learn. But 'follow a recipe' isn't just a one step operation for a newbie cook, there's a lot of other stuff that has to be learned along the way.
In that regard we do our kids (pretty much all of them) a disservice- our schools teach kids that learning is a boring and unpleasant activity that involves hard mental work with little practical reward and thus should be avoided when possible. And we grade their efforts- failures are punished as disgraces, not treated as opportunities to learn. So I don't entirely blame the dude who grows up out of that and doesn't feel super motivated to dive into something new.
I also blame schools for not teaching basic cooking and financial literacy to kids. I was given a semester or two of 'home economics', the only things I learned in that class were 1. the difference between a spatula and a pancake turner, and 2. that we'd be yelled at if we didn't dry the sink basin (even though it was about to get wet again). That curriculum needs a serious rethink.
Those step can be learn the usual way: trial and error.
I've been cooking for years (at home) and I still learn new thing and scree the meal sometimes. But there is the fun part of cooking: the uncertainty of not knowing if this time will be great, meh or a horror.
Staying motivated here requires a positive mindset. It requires the person to say 'it's okay if this one isn't good, I will learn from it and the next one will be better, and I will keep improving until I am good'.
That mindset is often not present. For someone without that positive mindset, the process is grueling- each step, each burned or bad dish becomes an F on their report card that kills their GPA, not a fun experience that needs more experimentation.
You have a strange idea of fun. I'm personally into the part where I get better at it each time.
It's only strange if you don't like trying new things.
it is. people are too stupid to read instructions.
they also do stupid stuff like think they can 'make it go faster' if they turn up the oven to 500 when it calls for 350, and wonder why their whole house is now filled with smoke.
they also irrational cling to bad habits because it was what their mom did or something.
Or they think why preheat the oven and then everything is sad.
Hence "if you can follow a recipe".