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Comment by michaelmior | Hacker News Reader

> Cooking is hard, requires a lot of hardware to do

I think this is completely false and it's unfortunate that people have this perception of cooking. Yes, it's true that if you want to be able to cook all the sorts of food you're used to having delivered, a lot of skill and hardware is probably required. However, you can cook a lot of great, tasty meals with a single pot and pan and a few inexpensive utensils and limited skill required. I think some of the biggest challenges to more people cooking at home is that it will always take more time than ordering.

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Completely agree. When I had to move to a different country to study, I did not know even how to brew tea (cooking never interested me), let alone cooking a decent meal. However, the craving for the food from my home country (which wasn't readily available near my campus) coupled with the financial constraint of not being able to eat outside for every meal (if you want good quality food that is) forced me to learn cooking. It started with simple things at first but now (more than a decade later) it is one of my hobbies and I find it meditative almost.

If you are forced to do it, you will do it. Besides, regarding the learning curve, it feels similar to going to the gym for the first time in your life. Initially you will see a lot of newbie gains (never knew I could make eatable food) which later plateau unless you want to reach the next level.

Agreed on the hardware requirements. I love to cook and have an extensive range of very expensive pots/pans/utensils with very specific uses, but in the beginning I had very few. I also still only use a few of them most of the time.

You can do almost everything with a 12" skillet/frying pan, a large sauce pan (4 qt maybe since you probably want to cook pasta in it), and one of those sets of 3-6 utensils (you don't even need that many) if you are cooking for 1-4.

And a kitchen/kitchen corner. I think what the parent is suggesting is that apartments wouldn't have kitchens at all, and you would eat at communal cafeteria. I believe this is what the vast majority of city dwellers in imperial rome would do?

Or in places like the USA, not that long ago.

Y'know how, in old movies, single people would live in single-room apartments, often with a Murphy bed that played a part in some amount of slapstick humor? They weren't cooking in there - dinner was served downstairs.

Yes -- boarding houses. It was expected that your rent would include at least an evening meal shared with the other residents. And like with many university dorms today, it was against the rules to cook in your rooms.

I still see them advertised everywhere in India: PGs (public guesthouses?)

I agree on the time it can take, but the skills element crops up a lot. That doesn't seem to be as big a problem when people have engaged in cooking as a child, or through a home economics class. As society changes there will probably be a bigger skills gap.

For me the most important skill is scoping. If I can scope the meal to something inside my skill range I can complete it competently and on a reasonable timeline. I can also choose when I want to push my bounds and allow extra time, or perhaps buy some extra ingredient in case I make a mistake. I think a lot of people don't have the skills and experience to do this and as a result the experience is negative. I can now look at recipes and analyze them reasonably accurately.

Things can be a challenge at different stages:

* Plan what to cook (Do I have the right tools? do I have ingredients I can use? Can I substitute something for this one odd ingredient? Do I need to go out of my way or will my regular grocery store have everything?)

* Acquire ingredients (They don't have something. What substitute is readily available?)

* Prep ingredients (Mostly this is just monotonous, but technique can play a part. Good quality basic tools like knives can make a difference. A more skilled person will be thinking about how to get the cooking step started at this point.)

* Cooking (Skill and experience prevent annoyances like things sticking, cooking too fast, burning etc. Many beginners can't get enough context from many recipes. If you didn't choose a meal that you had all the hardware for do you have alternatives? Should have been caught at the planning stages, but the inexperienced can miss something.)

* Cleanup (It drives me crazy to see this happen only at the end, and for the surfaces and sink to covered in items that need cleanup. A mountain of effort at the end can be unpleasant, especially if you are asking someone else to cleanup and they can't even get into the sink.)

Something I'd love to see as we move towards higher density urban living (in more US cities) is communal kitchens in apartments. On par with a gym.

It's ridiculous to have kitchen hardware * apartments, with abysmal utilization rates.

Throw some long benches and tables in there for people to eat if they want to. Good floorplan. Have bring your own wine Wednesdays or whatever.

The biggest misalignment in home cooking is scaling. It's trivial to make 6+ portions instead of 1-2. And often cheaper per portion.

Yes, there are challenges (dishes, cleaning), but nothing reasonable adults shouldn't be able to surmout (or lose kitchen rights).

> It's ridiculous to have kitchen hardware * apartments, with abysmal utilization rates.

The problem is common work/school/etc. schedules mean that the bulk of the utilization is at the same time; there isn't a lot to be gained by sharing unless you are in a quasi-executive commune, where a shared kitchen (and other living space) is already a norm.

If you want more people to choose to live in communes, good luck.

Missed the edit window, but that was intended to be “quasi-family communes”, not “quasi-executive”; mobile autocorrect is great at turning typos into radically different words.

I left the shared dorm kitchen behind when I graduated university. I prefer not to go back. I'd rather my kitchen be my own. Have you lived in a shared communal space where everyone uses the space but no one takes the time to clean? Try reigning those people in for me. No thanks.

Cooking to scale is also not a problem if you know what you're doing in the kitchen. Smaller kitchens and a lack of proper hardware can make cooking more challenging, but it's super easy to scale a recipe up and store away the extra portions. There are entire communities dedicated to meal prep tips and strategies.

It more comes down to training and time for most people, not a lack of hardware.

Yep. Communal pots & pans will be very abused and not cleaned after something was burned or scorched in them.

Totally agree. After watching what the poor admins at our company have to go through weekly just to keep the office fridge from having abandoned rotting food in it to getting everyone to load their used coffee cups in the dishwasher (and this is at an office where people arguably are on their best behavior at work!) I would NOT want to live somewhere with a shared kitchen.

> Have you lived in a shared communal space where everyone uses the space but no one takes the time to clean? Try reigning those people in for me.

Yes and yes. Successfully.

Being part of a community takes communication and negotiation.

Without that, we might as well all be living in the suburbs.

"Something I'd love to see as we move towards higher density urban living (in more US cities) is communal kitchens in apartments. On par with a gym."

There used to be something called a 'dining club' -in the Anglosphere it mostly descended from Oxbridge student dining clubs (some were regimental dining clubs). Various social clubs in the 1800s Anglosphere descended from these sorts of things. I used to belong to one; the Berkeley City Club. In addition to providing maybe hundreds of people with the services of a professional chef, it provides something not appreciated in the modern day, with people staring at their phones: an actual social circle, and a place to go after work that isn't a bar.

These sorts of things used to be quite common, and formed the nucleus of many political associations and movements, but they became less popular with the social atomization of the 1960s.

As someone who lived in a warehouse with at least 20 other people for a decade of my life - this is not as great an idea, long-term, as it first appears.

I used to think in terms of communal efficiencies (hence moving into a warehouse), but that idealism was quickly abated by the realities of living with other humans, most of whom it turns out, are broadly selfish and inherently lazy.

> As someone who lived in a warehouse with at least 20 other people for a decade of my life

not going to lie, this is a story that I'd love to hear more about. I've been thinking more about the co-living/co-working space these days, and a kind of a warehouse commune idea too.

Wow, HN commenters really hate other people.

because 3 people said they don't think it is a good idea?

5-1 negative opinions of other adults being able to clean dishes, at the time I'm writing this.

It wouldn't have struck me, except I named that very concern in my initial comment, and that many people still felt it's the first thing they should inform me of.

Most of us had experiences in college, but yeesh: I like to think everyone's grown as humans since their dorm days.

Yeah, cooking was hard for me because I had zero experience doing it. After successfully doing a couple recipes pulled online it doesn't seem remotely hard anymore. Tedious, maybe, but not hard, and there are plenty of recipes that produce huge quantities of food for very little effort, slow cooker and one-pot or whatever those pressure cookers are called being at the top of my list.

The thing is we aren't talking about writing "I can cook" on a tinder profile type cooking, we are talking about being able to replace a majority of that take out with cooking at home.

And I'm not talking about it being expensive in how everyone needs a Sous Vide. Cooking properly requires some things a lot of people don't have like access to a stove. If you take the bare necessities - which I would argue are a chefs knife for chopping, sauce pan, frying pan, a single burner hot plate, and probably you really want some form of oven, even if its just a convection.

Just those alone is several hundred dollars for even the most scrapyard worthy picks. Maybe you can get lucky and happen in to some deals. But probably the greatest premium is space - a lot of kids growing into the "don't ever cook" mentality are sacrificing having kitchen space whatsoever in their multi-tenant living arrangements and thus have no where to go with all this stuff.

And operating with such limiting tooling in my experience makes cooking feel hugely restrictive. Its already bad enough to be endeavoring to put in the work to make something yourself, but to consider it flawed from the outset because you don't have a pizza stone for your homemade pizza where your oven can't even reach a consistent 200c you easily deflate ones interest in learning it.

And saying its easy is also bad for anyone trying it out. It makes them feel worthless when they do struggle to dice vegetables the first hundred times until you develop the knack for it, or can't flip an omelette properly and end up with scrambled eggs. Because people on the Internet kept saying it was so easy.

Theres putting ham on bread and calling it a meal and theres the ability to take the bounty of nature and create a sensation that nothing else can produce out of it. If you tell people its satisfactory to just do the former and thats good enough you shouldn't be surprised when they stop trying and go out to eat all the time because they want the later. And there is no shortcut there - I constantly strive to cook new things because I want to get better at it and have for a decade now, and I like to push myself in making complicated dishes to experience new things, but I'd never ever risk someones intrigue in the culinary arts by saying its easy.

I was assuming that the majority of people have access to a stove and oven as I've always had even in the most low-budget living arrangements I've had as a student. Definitely without that, it does become more challenging.

> I'd never ever risk someones intrigue in the culinary arts by saying its easy.

I'm sure that's true from some. But the opposite could be true for others. I think saying it's easy as an isolated statement is pretty useless (note that I never said cooking was easy). However, I think rebuffing statements that cooking is hard coupled with pointers to easy dishes (which I admittedly didn't provide) are a good antidote.

Personally, I love to invite into my kitchen those I know who think cooking is too hard to try to equip them to believe otherwise :)

I wouldn't say it's hard. But it does have certain requirements that just aren't universally appealing.

True. I don't expect that everyone will enjoy cooking. But I think it's unfortunate that the myth that cooking is hard continues to be perpetuated. (I'll admit the statement it's a myth could be considered an opinion, but I still think cooking is easier than it's often made out to be.)

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