Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

 

My friend recently sent me a photo of a pot with three boiled eggs and three whole, uncut tomatoes.

She told me that she was trying to teach her sister to cook tomato and egg soup, and had instructed her to put three eggs and three tomatoes into a pot. The photo showed the "finished" result of her sister's "tomato and egg soup."

I've had a similar experience. When I was in college, a guy living downstairs knocked on my door, holding a pan and an egg in his hands. He asked me if I could teach him how to crack the egg.

Surely, he was joking. "No," he said. "I've never had to cook at home. My mom said  that cooking wasn't for boys."

For students studying away from home, cooking is an essential survival skill. But many don't realize this before having to leave the nest, and some parents even think that teaching their children how to cook might somehow be demeaning.

When I was in college, whenever I posted photos of my homemade meals online, people expressed their surprise and admiration at my cooking skills. But this shouldn't be the case. Children should be taught how to cook from a young age, so they don't have to resort to eating Doritos off the floor when the cafeteria is closed.

As for me, I started learning how to cook when I was in third grade. One day, my dad came home and threw me a bag of long beans. He said he was busy with work, so I would have to help him make dinner. I was instructed to wash and cut the beans, and then to stir fry them.

It was a baptism by fire. I didn't know what I was doing at all! I washed the beans with dishwashing liquid, and then cut them with a pair of scissors. Then I mistook the sesame oil for cooking oil.

Later on, I learned that the idea to make me cook had been simmering in my dad's head for a while. He wanted me to learn how to cook, so that during summer and winter vacations, when I was home alone, I wouldn't starve to death on account of not knowing my way around the kitchen.

Even though I made a fool of myself, I'm glad I was able to get such basic mistakes out of the way while I was still young.

Teaching children how to cook is not only about making sure they know how to fill their stomachs, but also about helping them acquire a necessary life skill on the way to becoming self-reliant.

Learning how to cook requires time and patience, but you end up gaining so much. I hope in the future, I won't attract such a crowd when I post my cooking photos online, and instead, I can be impressed by someone else's homemade culinary creations.

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.