- It's easy to outsource our cooking to professionals, but in so doing, we lose a fundamental skill, control over our nutrition, and an exercise that promotes out physical and mental health.
- Even if you've never cooked anything beyond grilled cheese, improving your cooking skills can seriously improve your quality of life.
- Learn about the benefits of learning to cook as well as some resources to help you along the way.
Few things are as difficult to categorize as cooking. What else can be called a skill, an art form, a science, and a survival tool at the same time? It's an activity that brings people together over the dinner table, but the act of cooking can also be a very private experience. It's a human adaptation, a clever trick that evolution gradually baked into our brains to conjure up more calories out of raw food to power the large brains that could, with any luck, come up with more clever tricks. It's something so fundamental that everyone knows how to do it to some degree, but only a few can master the practice after years of training. It's a life skill that can save you money, improve your mental and physical health, and attract the envy of your peers all at once. Here's why.
Cooking can save you money
When we look at the physiological changes that occurred to our ancestors, such as changes in their molar and body sizes, it seems as though human beings began cooking food about 1.9 million years ago. That's quite a long and storied history just for us to heat up Cup Noodles for every third meal.
Aside from not letting the cumulative knowledge of our ancestors go to waste, one of the major reasons to learn to cook is financial. According to a Pricenomics study, ordering delivery costs an average of $20.37. In comparison, making a home-cooked meal costs just $4.31. That's more than five times as expensive.
Despite this common knowledge, however, Americans still spend a significant chunk of change on food prepared outside the home. In 2017, Americans spent $3,365 a year on food prepared away from home. When you consider that only 39% of Americans have $1,000 or more in savings, this in and of itself is a pretty compelling reason to start cooking more. Of course, not everybody needs to worry about their finances. Some people have the money to spend, but there are still plenty of reasons to learn to cook aside from the financial one.
Eating out puts your health in jeopardy
It's no secret that cooking at home is healthier than eating out. Those delicious, professionally prepared meals really only taste so good because they're loaded with butter and salt.
One study examining chain restaurants in Philadelphia found that the average meal (defined as an entrée, side dish, and a small appetizer) contained nearly 1,500 calories. What's more, these meals contained 28 grams of saturated fat and 3,512 milligrams of sodium. Adults are only meant to consume at most 13 grams of saturated fat per day and 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day. Not only does eating out offer sub-par nutrition, but it also doubles your chances of catching a food-borne illness.
Meanwhile, a systematic review of 28 research studies found that adults who cooked at home had more energy, consumed less sodium, ate more fruits and vegetables, and consumed more fiber. As you might expect, improving your diet in this way is good for your health. Research has shown that close to half of all cardiometabolic deaths (e.g., heart disease, diabetes) are attributable to poor diets, and 20% of all deaths worldwide are linked to poor diets, which even beats smoking as a mortality risk.
Cooking's many psychosocial benefits
Cooking is both a biological necessity and a behavioral script that's been hardwired into our brains over the course of nearly two million years. As an example, a systematic review of the impact of cooking interventions on mental health found a number of positive outcomes. Study participants who engaged in baking sessions developed better self-esteem as a result of their improved concentration, coordination, and confidence. The participants also reported that one of the most satisfying aspects of the baking process was being able to produce a product that they could give away to others. The other studies in the review showed similar results; cooking raised self-esteem.
Cooking also improved positive affect — a term psychologists use to refer to the experience of emotion — and reduced negative affect. In addition, the review found that cooking improved overall well-being and health-related quality of life, primarily due to the nutritional benefits that cooking provides. Good nutrition and mental health are intimately related, so this finding should come as no surprise.
Resources
One of the intimidating things about learning to cook is that it requires an awful lot of skill, assuming you want to eat something tasty as well as healthy and cheap. Here's some resources that can help bring your cooking game to the next level.
1. The Joy of Cooking
The Joy of Cooking is arguably the classic cookbook. It's been in print since 1936 and has sold over 18 million copies for good reason. Though it's gone through many iterations over the years, it was first crafted at the very beginning of the Great Depression by Irma Rombauer, and its recipes are commensurately designed to encourage healthy, tasty, and cheap eating. That being said, make sure to do some research on which edition is the right one for you as it has changed considerably over its long history. If you'd rather not do the research, odds are you'll do just fine by borrowing whichever edition your parents used, and you'll likely gain some sense memories of childhood meals to boot.
2. The Essentials of Cooking
While there's no shame in following recipes line by line, it's a slow way to become a better cook. The Essentials of Cooking focuses on the basic techniques of cooking instead, providing readers with a cooking skillset to improvise and craft their own meals.
3. Mastering the Art of French Cooking
French cuisine is stereotyped as refined for good reason, although it is perhaps a bit buttery. Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a classic cookbook crafted by the quintessential celebrity chef, Julia Child and two other chefs who studied at Le Cordon Bleu. For those of you who want to craft those special dishes a step above your daily dinner, this is the book for you.
There is a slew of quality cookbooks out there, so don't feel as though you must acquire one of these three. Some may be more interested in books focusing on vegetarian dishes or books that focus on the basics exclusively. If it feels like there's just too much information out there, don't get discouraged. Just experimenting with what you have in your kitchen or working out a recipe you found online is the best way to get started honing your cooking skills.
We're learning more new things about death everyday. Much has been said and theorized about the great divide between life and the Great Beyond. While everyone and every culture has their own philosophies and unique ideas on the subject, we're beginning to learn a lot of new scientific facts about the deceased corporeal form.
An Australian scientist has found that human bodies move for more than a year after being pronounced dead. These findings could have implications for fields as diverse as pathology to criminology.
Dead bodies keep moving
Credit: Flickr
Researcher Alyson Wilson studied and photographed the movements of corpses over a 17 month timeframe. She recently told Agence France Presse about the shocking details of her discovery.
Reportedly, she and her team focused a camera for 17 months at the Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research (AFTER), taking images of a corpse every 30 minutes during the day. For the entire 17 month duration, the corpse continually moved.
"What we found was that the arms were significantly moving, so that arms that started off down beside the body ended up out to the side of the body," Wilson said.
The researchers mostly expected some kind of movement during the very early stages of decomposition, but Wilson further explained that their continual movement completely surprised the team:
"We think the movements relate to the process of decomposition, as the body mummifies and the ligaments dry out."
During one of the studies, arms that had been next to the body eventually ended up akimbo on their side.
The team's subject was one of the bodies stored at the "body farm," which sits on the outskirts of Sydney. (Wilson took a flight every month to check in on the cadaver.)
Her findings were recently published in the journal, Forensic Science International: Synergy.Implications of the study
The researchers believe that understanding these after death movements and decomposition rate could help better estimate the time of death. Police for example could benefit from this as they'd be able to give a timeframe to missing persons and link that up with an unidentified corpse. According to the team:
"Understanding decomposition rates for a human donor in the Australian environment is important for police, forensic anthropologists, and pathologists for the estimation of PMI to assist with the identification of unknown victims, as well as the investigation of criminal activity."
While scientists haven't found any evidence of necromancy. . . the discovery remains a curious new understanding about what happens with the body after we die.
Warp speed!
Ah, the warp drive, that darling of science fiction plot devices. So, what about a warp drive? Is that even a really a thing?
Let's start with the "warping" part of a warp drive. Without doubt, Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity ("GR") represents space and time as a 4-dimensional "fabric" that can be stretched and bent and folded. Gravity waves, representing ripples in the fabric of spacetime, have now been directly observed. So, yes spacetime can be warped. The warping part of a warp drive usually means distorting the shape of spacetime so that two distant locations can be brought close together — and you somehow "jump" between them.
This was a basic idea in science fiction long before Star Trek popularized the name "warp drive." But until 1994, it had remained science fiction, meaning there was no science behind it. That year, Miguel Alcubierre wrote down a solution to the basic equations of GR that represented a region that compressed spacetime ahead of it and expanded spacetime behind to create a kind of traveling warp bubble. This was really good news for warp drive fans.
The problems with a warp drive
There were some problems though. Most important was that this "Alcubierre drive" required lots of "exotic matter" or "negative energy" to work. Unfortunately, there's no such thing. These are things theorists dreamed up to stick into the GR equations in order to do cool things like make stable open wormholes or functioning warp drives.
It's also noteworthy that researchers have raised other concerns about an Alcubierre drive — like how it would violate quantum mechanics or how when you arrived at your destination it would destroy everything in front of the ship in an apocalyptic flash of radiation.
Warp drives: A new hope
Credit: Primada / 420366373 via Adobe Stock
Recently, however, there seemed to be good news on the warp drive front with the publication this April of a new paper by Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martre entitled "Introducing Physical Warp Drives." The good thing about the Bobrick and Martre paper was it was extremely clear about the meaning of a warp drive.
Understanding the equations of GR means understanding what's on either side of the equals sign. On one side, there is the shape of spacetime, and on the other, there is the configuration of matter-energy. The traditional route with these equations is to start with a configuration of matter-energy and see what shape of spacetime it produces. But you can also go the other way around and assume the shape of spacetime you want (like a warp bubble) and determine what kind of configuration of matter-energy you will need (even if that matter-energy is the dream stuff of negative energy).
Warp drives are simpler and much less mysterious objects than the broader literature has suggested.
What Bobrick and Martre did was step back and look at the problem more generally. They showed how all warp drives were composed of three regions: an interior spacetime called the passenger space; a shell of material, with either positive or negative energy, called the warping region; and an outside that, far enough away, looks like normal unwarped spacetime. In this way they could see exactly what was and was not possible for any kind of warp drive. (Watch this lovely explainer by Sabine Hossenfelder for more details). They even showed that you could use good old normal matter to create a warp drive that, while it moved slower than light speed, produced a passenger area where time flowed at a different rate than in the outside spacetime. So even though it was a sub-light speed device, it was still an actual warp drive that could use normal matter.
That was the good news.
The bad news was this clear vision also showed them a real problem with the "drive" part of the Alcubierre drive. First of all, it still needed negative energy to work, so that bummer remains. But worse, Bobrick and Martre reaffirmed a basic understanding of relativity and saw that there was no way to accelerate an Alcubierre drive past light speed. Sure, you could just assume that you started with something moving faster than light, and the Alcubierre drive with its negative energy shell would make sense. But crossing the speed of light barrier was still prohibited.
So, in the end, the Star Trek version of the warp drive is still not a thing. I know this may bum you out if you were hoping to build that version of the Enterprise sometime soon (as I was). But don't be too despondent. The Bobrick and Martre paper really did make headway. As the authors put it in the end:
"One of the main conclusions of our study is that warp drives are simpler and much less mysterious objects than the broader literature has suggested"
That really is progress.
Late Medieval England had its share of problems. The Wars of Roses raged, the Black Death killed off large parts of the population, and passing ruffians could say "Ni" at will to old ladies.
To make matters worse, a first of its kind study published in the International Journal of Paleopathology has demonstrated that much of the population suffered from another plague — a plague of bunions likely caused by a ridiculous medieval fashion trend.
If the shoe fits, it won't cause bunions
The outlines of a leather shoe from the King's Ditch, Cambridge. It is easy to see how these shoes might be constricting. Copyright Cambridge Archaeological Unit.
The bunion, known to medicine as "hallux valgus," is a deformity of the joint connecting the big toe to the rest of the foot. It is painful and can cause other issues including poor balance. The condition is associated with having worn constrictive shoes for a long period of time as well as genetic factors. Today, it is often caused by wearing high heeled shoes.
The medieval English didn't care for high heeled shoes as much as modern fashionistas, but there was a major fashion trend toward shoes with long, pointed toes called "poulaines" or "crakows" for their supposed place of origin, Krakow, Poland.
This trend, already silly-looking to a modern observer, got out of hand in a hurry. According to some records, the points on nobleman's shoes could be so long as to require tying them to the leg with string so the wearer could walk. At one point, King Edward IV had to ban commoners from wearing points longer than two inches. A couple years later, he saw fit to ban the shoes altogether.
But, just knowing that people back in the day made poor fashion choices doesn't prove they suffered for it. That is where digging up old skeletons to look at their feet comes in.
Beauty is pain: the price of high medieval fashion
To learn how bad the bunion epidemic was, the researchers looked to four burial sites in and around Cambridge. One was a rural cemetery where poor peasants were buried. Another was the All Saints by the Castle parish, which had a mixed collection of people that tended toward poverty. The Hospital of St. John's burial ground contained both the poor charges of a charity hospital and wealthy benefactors. Lastly, they considered the cemetery of a local Augustinian friary, home to monks and well-to-do philanthropists.
The team considered 177 adult skeletons that were at least a quarter complete and still had enough of their feet to make studying them possible. The remains were classified by age and sex by observation and DNA testing. Each was examined for evidence of bunions and signs of complications from the condition, such as falling.
Those buried in the monastery's graveyard were the most affected. Nearly half, 43 percent, of the remains found there had bunions. This includes five of the eleven members of the clergy they found. Twenty-three percent of those laid to rest at the Hospital of St. John had bunions, though only 10 percent of those at the All Saints by the Castle parish graveyard did.
The rural cemetery had a much lower rate of instances, only three percent, suggesting that these peasants were able to avoid at least one plague.
Overall, eighteen percent of the individuals examined had bunions, with men more likely to have them than women. Those at cemeteries known for exclusivity were more likely to have them as well, though it is clear that the condition also affected members of other classes. This makes sense, as it is known that these shoes had mass appeal.
The authors note that the rural cemetery having fewer cases is partly because that cemetery "went out of use prior to the wide adoption of pointed shoes, and it is likely that those residing in the parish predominately wore soft leather shoes, or possibly went barefoot."
Those skeletons with evidence of bunions were more likely to have fractures indicative of a fall. This was more common on those estimated or recorded as having lived past age 45.
In our much more enlightened times, 23 percent of the population currently endures having bunions, most of them women, and one of the leading culprits behind this is the high heeled shoe.
Some things never change.
