Stir the pot, why don’t you

It will literally make you live longer

Some skills deliver a lifetime return on investment. In the professional world, I have two favorites: financial literacy (the ability to understand money, compounding, and risk) and communication (well, duh).

In my own domestic world, there’s cooking–a skill that pays staggering dividends in the form of nutrition and community. I learned how to cut up a chicken in June of 2020 from a now 12-year-old New York Times YouTube video. The world was on lockdown, the restaurants were closed, and delivery portions were often for sharing, sometimes expensive, or often unhealthy–or all three.

People like me, who lived alone, were bound to eat the same things over and over again until we learned what to do with vegetables and raw protein.

Believe it or not, Gallup has home-cook archetypes

Every year, Gallup teams up with Cookpad to run the Global Analysis of Cooking Around the World, a study that peeks into kitchens everywhere to see how, and how often, people cook.

The findings paint an interesting picture. Across the globe, people cook about 6.4 meals a week and eat around 10 meals at home. But the habits change depending on where you look. In Northern, Southern, and Western Europe, for instance, people are busy in the kitchen nearly eight times a week. In the Arab states, the number drops to fewer than five.

Women cook nearly twice as often as men—about eight meals compared to four.

But beyond how much people cook is the question of how much they enjoy it. About 58% of people say they like cooking, though the joy is more common among women.

I’m part of the Joyful Chefs club, and together, we form 36% of the global cooking population who do about 9 meals a week (and honestly, if I include the 11 PM shredded elote and easy kimbap snacks, I do more than 9).

There are Seasoned Culinarians (13%), often older adults, who cook the most at nearly ten meals a week; the Home Cooking Professionals (12%), full-time workers who still make room for cooking; and the Reluctant Cooks (17%), who see it as a chore and cook only about five times a week.

And lastly, we have Crowded Kitchen Cooks (7%), who prepare meals for big households.

There is joy in cooking. It is the closest thing we have to a science lab.

If we do it right, we get rewarded with great food.

Lifetime returns

The lifetime ROI is detailed in another interesting paper called Scientifically Supported Links Between Cooking and Well-being done by the Nature Strategy Reports, commissioned by Ajinomoto, and published in February 2024.

The study says that people who cook at home tend to eat more nutrient-dense foods and fewer ultra-processed ones. But the benefits aren’t automatic, and they depend on the ingredients and cooking methods (chicken breasts being infinitely better than chicken nuggets, and stewing being way better than frying).

You get the drift. Fry everything in palm or corn oil, and the health benefits. If you build meals around vegetables, legumes, lean proteins, and whole grains, the return multiplies.

I absolutely get the love for some processed foods, and I do have a Nongshim Shin Ramyun addiction–but cooking allows me to add nutrient density to it with the inclusion of sesame oil, shiitake, enoki, silken tofu, bokchoy, some gochujang, and milk.

Nutrient-rich diets have been linked to reduced inflammation and improved mood. But there’s a quicker psychological return.

Cooking, even in its simplest form, builds a sense of self-efficacy. The quiet satisfaction of turning raw ingredients into a meal is itself a powerful antidote to feeling powerless. And it is exactly what I felt after successfully making my first pot of kimchi jiggae in September of 2023.

Cooking is control.

When you cook, you decide the portion sizes. You choose whether that pan gets a drizzle of oil or a heavy pour, whether your salad dressing is a quick squeeze of lemon and olive oil or a pre-made packet loaded with sugar.

TBH, the little decisions compound over weeks, months, years. They add up to better energy and cleaner lab results (for real, my bloodwork results right now are way better than when I was 26 years old).

Cooking isn’t just about what you eat today; it’s about stacking nutritional advantages that quietly pay dividends for decades.

So yeah, stir the pot.

It will help you live longer and better.

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