If you’re happy with the state of your cooking skills and diet, then I would say it’s not a problem. For me,cooking is a highly enjoyable, useful, and relaxing skill, and I look forward to cooking most every day. The basics are easy to pick up, you just need the motivation and desire to learn. If cooking is a chore for you, or you view food more as something of necessity rather than pleasure, then learning how to cook isn’t terribly important. As long as you’ve got the skills to keep yourself happy and well fed, who cares?
How much do you like to eat **good **food. I do, a lot. If you don’t really care, carry on with what you are doing.
My first days out of the nest, all I could do was heat up Dinty Moore beef stew out of the can, and boil weinies and sauerkraut. Since that wasn’t sufficient for my palate, I started learning how to cook.
Mom was (and is still) a good, boring, Midwestern-style cook. I can do most of what she can do, but I have gone way beyond that.
I guess it all depends on you and whether you have any desire to expand your culinary horizons. I recommend foodtv’s Good Eats as an introduction to the why’s and how’s of cooking. (As would a large number of Doper foodies.)
Satisfying other people is a terrible reason. Satisfying yourself is a much better one. Go to the Farmers’Market, or the grocery, and get some vegetables. Look up how to cook them - it’s not that hard. Compare the results with frozen. That’s pretty minimal coioking, but it has a ton of rewards. Frozen is a lot better than it used to be, but fresh is better still.
My mother was a great housekeeper, was very neat and did everything around the house. However, she loathed cooking.
She had about two or three things she could make well, and that was it. Period.
However, due to that, my father was a great cook - and all three of us boys learned how to cook at an early age. I can remember barely able to reach the stove and cooking!
To her dying day, and much to her chagrin, I would thank her for forcing us kids to learn how to cook. Today I can whip up just about anything from scratch - and I love cookbooks and experimenting with new things - same with my SO. We have leftovers in our freezer that would rank as gourmet in other households!
But if you don’t like to cook - don’t fret. It is not everybody’s forte. It might, however, be a good idea to surround yourself with people who do cook well - once you learn how easy it really is, you might be inclined to try it yourself!
I don’t like food. I have no interest in cooking beyond the heating up I currently do to get myself fed. But then, I only have myself to please, so it all ended up well, in that department at least.
Worry about it when it matters. Until then, who cares?
Sounds about right to me. For general cooking you just want to know approximately how large/small you should cut stuff up, whether you want to cook things in liquids or fry/sautee them, approximately how long it should cook and how to tell when it’s cooked (never, ever, rely on times in recipes to tell you when something’s done - cooking doesn’t work like that). The rest is mostly down to your own taste.
this guy has some amazingly helpful videos dealing with all of that (especially check out the earlier videos).
To answer the OP: I don’t think it’s very important to learn to cook really well, but basic cooking is a very useful skill to have, it can help you eat nicer/healthier food for possibly less money, and it’s a lot of fun. 
Of course you can live a happy and fulfilled life knowing only how to boil pasta and operate a microwave. In the exact same sense that you can live a happy and fulfilled life reading and writing at a third grade level; knowing only how to add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers with two digits or less; knowing nothing of history other than that it was different back then and nothing of geography other than it’s different in other places; and so on.
It limits your options, your outlook, and in some ways your understanding of and contact with the world around you of course. But you are perfectly free to choose for that if you like.
Don’t have to learn how to cook. I didn’t really learn until my late twenties, and that was because of desire, not necessity.
Do what I did - get involved with someone who loves to cook and is a wonderful cook. Every day I come home and dinner is either on the table or in the process.
Mom said I’d never find a man who cooked and I’d be doomed to be alone because I couldn’t cook. Take THAT, Mom!
Ditto. I never really “cooked” until I got married at 32 and started a family. Until then there really was no need to. Cooking for one isn’t any cheaper than eating out for one unless you’re really into leftovers (I wasn’t). I didn’t want to invest in cooking supplies, ingredients that would go bad, and the time to prep stuff. A complete waste of time for me as a single guy. And it’s not like I was living off of McDs and TacoBell. Plenty of fresh, good for you take out food if you look for it.
And once I did start to cook it didn’t take as much skill as people make it out to be. Follow a recipe and see how it turns out, tweak it to your liking the next time around.
There’s a decent argument to be made that cooking is a fundamental skill which has shaped human evolution. It’s the central topic of a new book by Harvard professor of Biological Anthropology Richard Wrangham, called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
Many of the social rites we still deal with today, ranging from the “role” of women, to the social mores of etiquette, are examined. A podcast with an interview with the author is available as an MP3 download. It’s about 45 minutes and gives a decent overview of the book. While many of the reasons to learn to cook have changed from the days when nutritious food was much more difficult to obtain and prepare, the impact those daily struggles had on society as it formed still resonates today. If you’re interested in knowing why people think it’s important, this book can help you find that answer.
Enjoy,
Steven
I think it’s important to know the bare-bones basics of cooking in the same way it’s important to know the bare-bones basics of car maintenance, carpentry, and sewing. You don’t have to be able to actually change the oil, but you should know how often to have someone else do it. You don’t really need to know how to build something, but you should be able to find a stud and drive a nail into it straight to hang something heavy. You don’t need to be able to make your own clothes, but you should be able to repair a ripped seam and replace a button. Being lacking in these areas is limiting and makes you very, very dependent on other people for pretty basic stuff.
By the same token, you should be able to make something that isn’t boiled, nuked, or spread. Even if it’s only grilled cheese sandwiches. If you choose not to use those skills and eat pasta, frozen veggies and PBJ every meal for the rest of your life, I say go for it. But making that choice is a very, very different thing than having that choice made for you.
And, frankly, I wouldn’t get involved with someone who couldn’t cook beyond what you describe, because that means I would either have to subsist on an endless treadmill of pasta, nuked veggies, and PBJ, or cook every single meal by myself with no help. Either option would draw a hearty “fuck that shit” from me, and it just wouldn’t be worth the hassle.
This is my point of veiw too. To make something that others can appreciate is like fine art.
Hey, as long as your nutritional requirements are being met and the food you can make satisfies your palate, who cares? It’d be nice to be able to cook, but if you’re trying to impress friends, you can always pick up the phone and put takeout on a nice plate.
I think I’m a relatively good cook with a wide range of ability, but if I had only myself to cook for, I’d probably be eating a lot of cereal for dinner.
Well, there’s always teaching the poor pathetic non-cook, starting with such skills as Peeling The Potatoes, Chopping The Onions, and Cleaning Up Afterwards. I think that I’d be happy to be the main cook if only my husband would cheerfully clean up completely afterwards. If I’m tired of my own cooking, I know of several restaurants.
I did make sure that my daughter learned how to cook. It’s one of her hobbies now, and she’s very good at it.
I have to admit that I have two conflicting responses to the question in the title/OP.
The first is that no, in the modern era, there are so many restaurants and so many options at the grocery store for foods which just require various degrees of heating, that no, knowing how to cook is not that big a deal.
The other reaction is sorrow, because if you don’t know how to cook, you are missing out on at least 3 great pleasures in life. 1. Eating good food which you have prepared 2. Cooking good food 3. Doing something simple which nevertheless knocks someone else’s socks off.
My most recent “triumph” in category 3 was a “crustless” mushroom quiche. Recipe obtained from the internet, cheese called for cut in half because I could. The chopping mushroom step took forever, but the rest was easy and not time consuming (OK, except for the baking bit). But it tasted good, fed me for several days, and highly impressed several people who tasted it.
I can understand the impulse, when faced with a recipe which calls for chopping a pound of mushrooms and dirties 3 pots or pans, to decide that it’s just not worth it for oneself alone. But there are a lot of things which are not much harder to cook the instant version of than to buy the ready prepared version, and not that much harder to cook the non-instant version which tastes much, much better than the instant version. (Chocolate pudding comes to mind. Made from real chocolate. Probably better that I don’t bother to fix it often . . . )
One issue I’ve seen a lot with people who don’t know the basics of cooking is when health does become an issue, they’ve got a lot to catching up to do. In your 20s and early 30s, a lot of people can get away with eating a not-so-healthy diet. Then all of a sudden, they or someone in their family starts putting on weight/becoming allergic to a common food/developing a condition that requires them to eat healthier. Or they have a kid, and suddenly Good Nutrition is more important to them.
If you learn the basics of cooking in your 20s, then you have a good base to expand upon. Many people who have never even thought about food until they are 43 get overwhelmed when they realize they have So Much To Learn.
And, like everyone else says, there’s few pleasures in life like making your own food and presenting it to a loved one.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think it takes much to learn the basics, especially if you have years to do it. Go buy Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” (or the non-veg version for the meat eaters.) He specializes in simple foods that don’t require that you have 15 ingredients. And they’re good. Even if you only make two recipes a year that you like, you’re ahead of the curve.
I think of it like sex.
Yeah, you can fulfill the biological function of sex even if you’re lousy in bed. But if you learn what you’re doing, you can have a helluva lot more fun with it.
Substitute “cooking” for “sex” and “kitchen” for “bed,” and there you go.
Sounds to me like it’s less of a problem with cooking, and more of an old fight with your mom. Is this kind of the comfortable rut y’all are finding yourselves in? Is this where your conversations end up? If so, my recommendations about learning to cook consist of not having this conversation with your mom any more, and instead thinking about food independently of her rather than in opposition to her.
For one thing, you can live a whole lot more cheaply if you can cook. I’ve been doing this Cook for Good for a couple weeks now, and theoretically it’s a buck and change per meal. (More for me, because I’ve wasted some stuff, but still remarkably cheap.) You have to not be afraid of making your own bread (no-knead recipe, though) and such, though.
I’m not the world’s greatest cook, and cooking is not a favorite hobby of mine (except baking desserts). But I find that, like just about anything else, once you learn the basics and put some effort into it, it becomes much easier and more enjoyable and interesting. I’m a far better cook now than I was 10+ years ago, and it’s a lot less effort.
I didn’t learn to cook until I was just about out of college, and it was a slow process. My first lessons came from my college boyfriend’s roommate–I still make his mac and cheese, and I use a lot of Tony Chachere’s because of him. I’m still learning–my daughter’s expanding allergies have forced me to learn a lot I should have already known. I do wish I’d started younger and not lived so much on burritos in college–I resisted my mom’s cooking lessons and the fact is, she’s a great and creative cook and I missed out.
For a long time I didn’t feel that I was a talented cook and I screwed up a lot of meals. But it’s not magic, it’s just a matter of principles and practice, like anything else.
To specifically address the OP and the Mom issue–if it is an issue of you vs. Mom and you don’t want her telling you what to do and all, that’s understandable. But if you’re an adult and still living your life by “I’ll do the opposite of what you want, whatever that is”–that’s not breaking free and doing what is right for your life and evaluating ideas based on your values–it’s just living by reaction.
I like how all of the cooks are in here extolling the joys of cooking.
Nope. Cooking is pretty boring, honestly. Sure, it might be fun to cook once in a while and present it to your loved one, but daily cooking is a chore and a half and I hate it.
People are different. Some of us find this mind-numbing chore fun, some don’t. Personally, I rather like baking - not just sweets, but all kinds of foods. Cooking itself is not very fun. And I know how to cook, and do so, but it’s not for everyone.