Cooking from home as many advantages and is a great way to optimize your health. As modern humans, we are all about convenience. Convenience is great but if it causes us to sacrifice our health and community wellness, it is a short term solution that will cause long term devastation. If we do not have our health there are not many other things that matter except maybe our family, and cooking from home will improve both! We like to make cooking from home easy and convenient, and over the following weeks, we will continue to give tips to help make the home cooking process fast, efficient, nutritious, and delicious!
Here are some of the pros of home cooking.
1. Self Reliance: If you really had to survive on your own could you? Nature is unbiased and will not help you. Currently, humans have made a system that a person can go their whole life relying on others to prepare their food for them. At Rooted Living, we like to focus on helping human beings become more resilient. If a person is resilient they can respond better no matter what life throws at them. Learning to cook is a step towards taking control of your life and not relying on others to live.
2. Appreciation of the Process: When someone has worked hard at something there is so much more appreciation for the final product. The more one cooks the more they realize that each step of the process is important and can have a huge impact on the final outcome of a meal. This can include everything from the soil and farming methods all the way to how it is cut and cooked. Ultimately, appreciation of the process leads to gratitude, and living with gratitude helps one to stay rooted in what is important. The only thing in life that we can truly control is our attitude and how we respond to any situation.
3. Connections to Food: Similar to the appreciation of the process, cooking and eating the food you cook will help you to develop a relationship with your body. If food is cooked for you, generally you do not know what is in it or how it is cooked. Our bodies are amazing self-healing and adapting organisms and are constantly giving feedback about how well it’s doing and what it needs. The hard part is learning to listen. Cooking and eating will help you to form a relationship with your body and learn foods and cooking methods your body likes and ones that it may not.
4. Preparation of the Digestive System: Cooking, specifically smelling and tasting food let our bodies know that food is on the way. When we smell food it sends an alert to our digestive system to prep enzymes that break down food for digestion. We also have enzymes in our mouth that coat the food and prep it for digestion, so properly chewing (which also stimulates digestion) your food is paramount to being able to break down and utilize food properly.
5. Knowing Exactly What’s in Your Food: With exception to what they add to the food during the growing and harvesting process, cooking your own food lets you know exactly what is in it. In an age where nutrition labels have unpronounceable additives, added sugars, and processed oils are the norm cooking at home gives you control over what is in your food.
6. Satisfaction and Community: There is a reason many people say “there is nothing better than a home-cooked meal”. Working hard and creating a delicious meal that your whole family enjoys is not only rewarding but helps to tie the family together. Eating together, many times, people start as strangers and leave as friends. Being able to cook also helps you contribute and add value to your community and the people you love. There is a deep need for humans to able to contribute to their fellow man and it would be hard to find a more delicious way than with a home-cooked meal.
The Rooted Living staff hopes that we have inspired you to spend a little more time in the kitchen. We would love to answer questions and aid you on your journey to a more vibrant and resilient version of yourself. Check it out!
