This is an incredible self-report. If you consider microwaved meals to be your default method of cooking and not something primarily for reheating leftovers or defrosting frozen meat, I sincerely hope you've gotten your cholesterol and blood pressure checked recently. That is not normal.
this is nuts! I use an oven every day dude - so its a special occasion is it?
The default method for cooking is using an oven or using a stove. Microwaving is for heating up left-overs for the most part.
One of the dangers of people who are too close to programming is that they think of life as binary.
I’d also say that while I like my air fryer oven, I would prefer to do some of the bigger things like a whole bird in the oven. It’s cheaper to buy a whole bird for meal prep.
Or you're batch cooking
I’m from northern Europe. I might use the micro to heat up leftovers or a cup of water for tea or whatever in a pinch, but in this household (and at all my friends’), the stove and the oven cooks the food. I know literally no-one who could say they cook most meals in the micro.
I didn’t have a microwave oven before we bought a house. It took up too much space to justify, for such a relatively rarely-used appliance.
I think OP is just an outlier.
Thankfully there is real data if we want to know how microwaves are used. Survey below says they are used a bit more than ovens, but half as much as cooktops/stoves. Varies by cohort and meal.
Source: https://indoor.lbl.gov/publications/residential-cooking-beha...
Although, the analogy seems sort of useless, in that the food preparation ecosystem is really not any less complex than the program creation ecosystem, so it doesn’t offer any simplification.
I've lived without a microwave for a long time and it's only a little bit inconvenient because things take longer to reheat.
Ovens are a special occasion thing in my house because our oven is huge and I can usually do the same thing in the air fryer, which is just a small convection oven.
Not true in my household, in my parent's, in my in-laws, or any of my closest friends'. And none of us are cooks, so it's not a niche thing.
I'm sure in a lot of households the microwave oven is the primary form of cooking, but it's important to look outside the bubble before reporting trends.
The food have been cooked in industrial ovens in the factory.
That really only makes sense if for households with a toaster oven, single adults, childless couples, and retired people. A toaster oven makes a lot more sense for small meals, in part because it can heat up much faster than a full oven.
Otherwise, a daily family meal isn't a special occasion.