I like being a home cook. People mean it as a compliment when they say, “You could sell this,” or, “You should enter a contest,” but I think, maybe, what’s behind that – unconsciously – is the notion that what you’re doing is not valid unless you are doing it to make money or to dominate someone else. I mean, you can’t do cooking because it makes you happy, right?
During a recent podcast of The Food Programme from the BBC, the founder of the Moley Robotic Kitchen, Mark Olynik, described how people will be able to download a dish from a celebrity chef for a small fee just like downloading a song. His kitchen robot will then be able to cook the dish exactly like the celebrity chef has specified. He said it will eliminate boring food preparation and give you more time to spend on something that will make you happy.
Moley Robotic Kitchen has teamed with Tim Anderson, a past winner of the BBC show MasterChef, and has programmed a robot to copy him making a dish the same way Hollywood copies an actor’s movements when creating animated special effects. Anderson said that a robot could be programmed for fine dining or for nostalgic cooking. He said that if a robot could be programmed to make Wisconsin Beer Cheese Soup the way he remembered, it would make him happy.
It’s interesting that both men gave “Happiness” as a reason for robots taking over the role of cooking. According to one British Columbian study, out of 66 leisure activities that contribute to a person’s sense of well-being, cooking was the best predictor of happiness. A study of amateur chefs reported that cooking allowed them to express their creativity and feel good about themselves.
Grocery industry researcher Eddie Yoon reports that 90% of Americans either hate to cook or are lukewarm about it, yet the British Columbian study shows that cooking as a leisure activity is the best predictor of happiness. What gives? People are fascinated by what they see on TV about cooking, but TV cooking is mostly about the spectacle of food warriors in combat and not about real people creating dishes in real kitchens. Madison Avenue has drilled the message that “cooking is drudgery” into American minds for decades and they have been successful in convincing people that home cooking is a chore and a waste of leisure time.
McDonalds has a commercial out for their delivery service that says, “We deliver Happy.” Like rats on the hedonic treadmill, advertisers want to brain wash people into giving up an activity that will actually make them happy in order to be a consumer of something that will make them less and less happy over time.
There’s a school of thought that says people need three things for psychological health:
- Autonomy: feeling in control of behavior and goals.
- Competence: gaining mastery of tasks or skills.
- Relatedness: feeling a sense of belonging or attachment to others.
Being a home cook satisfies the first two criteria and the act of cooking for others satisfies the third. There’s a real chance that home cooking will become a niche hobby like knitting. What will we lose by giving up a creative activity that gives us real happiness for yet another consumer activity that leaves us empty?
Michalos, C.A. (2005). Arts and the quality of life: An exploratory study. Social Indicators Research, 71, 11-59.
Daniel, M., Guttmann, Y., Raviv, A. (2011). Cooking and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: A qualitative analysis of amateur chefs’ perspectives. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 1 No. 20
Schmecken! 