Cooking is a new hobby!

-Milantha Chandiok

The fear of the COVID-19 has got all of us locked down in our homes. With the quarantine taking away the joy of going out from us, everything seems like a mess. While it’s getting hard to do something productive with our time and deal with the stress, many of us have picked up a new hobby, cooking.

Cooking is an art they say, and now we have plenty of time to make this art our own. Not only it helps us pass our free time, but it also brings us the joy of mastering a new skill. The feeling when the dish you prepared smells good is something so raw and beautiful.

Cooking is our love language

Food is a necessity for every living being. But we humans tend to make it something more. Be it our mothers or grandmothers, they’ve always conveyed their love to us through the food they cooked for us. And with the Quarantine season going on, we have made cooking our new love language. Now it’s not just moms working all day in the kitchen.

A lot of teens have taken up the charge of their kitchens. It is the purest form of love when your kids prepare you a meal. Also, cooking has given families a lot of bonding time. Until now everyone was busy in their own lives. But this lockdown has given the people a chance to pause life and enjoy it with the people close to them.

Cooking against Anxiety

We all must have noticed that 2 weeks into quarantine and almost everyone we knew got into baking. As the coronavirus pandemic spreads through the world, everyone is increasingly practicing social distancing to slow the spread of the disease. Millions of people around the world are spending a lot more time in their homes than they used to.

With shelter-in-place orders in many states, work-from-home directives from many employers, and many public spaces such as theaters, museums, bars, and restaurants all shut down, people are turning to cook while self-quarantined not just for sustenance but for comfort and entertainment, too.

Quarantine cooking has become about more than just feeding yourself. Cooking and baking have become an outlet to channel all the fears and anxieties of lockdown. With the uncertainties that lie ahead of us, cooking has given us a break from all the stress. But that’s not all. Home cooking and baking also function as a way to pass the hours and feel productive.

All the people who had their hands and minds full before lockdown with their work might feel anxious. And we are dealing not with just our anxiety but also stress, loneliness and lack of motivation. Without any knowledge of what might happen tomorrow, cooking helps us to feel like we’ve accomplished something.

Due to the lack of motivation to even complete our daily tasks, we have detached from our normal living methods. Cooking brings us the motivation to go ahead with our days and gives us a sense of belongingness.

So if you don’t cook, or haven’t yet, don’t dive into it with cooking as the focus of your efforts. Just do what makes you happy — make the food you love to eat.

That, my friends, is the real joy of cooking!