Food serves a very simple purpose to many people. It’s practical, and eating it is simply a necessary part of the day. It can be interesting to examine this line of thinking if you’re someone who resides on the other side of the spectrum – passionate about food and trying different types of it. If you are in that former camp, though, it might be worth asking if it could be something that plays a larger role.
Why would you want that? Wouldn’t that simply mean you distract yourself from other things and spend more money? That’s one way of looking at it, but it could also become something of a hobby of yours and allow you to get much more out of this aspect of life.
From Functionality to Enjoyment
The step between functionality and enjoyment might be a large one, but to get started, it might only take looking at how food plays a part in the routine of your day. Coffee is a good example of this – something that many people include in their day to give them the boost that they need for work, or sometimes just to get started in the morning. However, coffee doesn’t have to only serve that purpose and nothing more. It can be something that you purely enjoy for the taste. This might have been something you’re aware of due to the abundance of coffee-flavoured foods, but it might not have been something you have had personal experience with.
Looking into how different types, and higher quality versions of what you’re used to, such as Ethiopian coffee, can enhance the overall experience might make a world of difference. This might also mean that you get different equipment (a press or grinder) and that your routine changes slightly, but those might all be changes for the better.
The result, if all goes well, isn’t just that you now enjoy the taste of something you didn’t mind before. It’s that this is a part of your day that you can look forward to with greater intensity. The boost that it gives you as a result of the caffeine is now just one part of what it offers you, and that heightened interest in coffee might mean that you find ways to get more out of the drink in other parts of life.
It’s not just coffee that you can apply this to. If you find that you currently structure and eat your meals in a way that puts practicality first, you might be doing the bare minimum – just ensuring that you’re eating enough to be healthy and content. However, this could be missing out on a large part of what this experience can offer, and a greater emphasis on taste might uncover a whole dimension to this world that you were completely unaware of beforehand.
Exploring Healthier Options
As mentioned, though, it’s not just about taste and how much you enjoy your food. It’s also about what your food can offer you as an opportunity to be healthier. When looking to improve your lifestyle, you might generally turn to exercise as the largest factor in how much weight you can lose (for example), but you might be surprised to learn that diet is often regarded as the more important of the two in this regard.
Therefore, how can you alter your diet to focus on a greater variety of healthier options while also maintaining that element of taste that is so important to you? Fortunately, while they might not be as typical or tasty in the kinds of ways that greasier and saltier meals can often be, you might find a lot to love in a healthier palette – though it may require an open mind to get started.
Fish is something that can have a whole host of health benefits, so finding ways to incorporate that into some of your meals can naturally have a positive effect. Tray bakes that include vine tomatoes and feta can include that element of taste and saltiness that you might enjoy in other meals, but with something like couscous as a base, you might find that it still manages to remain later than a lot of alternatives. You might find that it’s more about breaking a habit. Once you get used to eating healthier, the difference in how you feel might only be part of the reason that you stick with it.
Cooking as a Skill
What’s also worth considering when thinking about the importance of food in your life, is how valuable the skill of cooking is. Being able to utilise a whole variety of different ingredients to produce any number of meals is something that can save you a lot of money and can have you sampling a bunch of different tastes and flavours outside of what you would normally.
First, the financial aspect. If you currently rely on ready meals or takeaways more than you’d like, swapping to cooking most of your meals and having the ability to do so in bulk can be incredibly beneficial in how much you save. That’s without even mentioning the health aspects, and how having that level of control over the ingredients that you’re eating can have you feeling much healthier even without making an active effort to do so.
How to get started then? That might be the question that seems too daunting to answer, as if learning this skill will take time that you don’t have. Indeed, the time that you have to spend cooking at the end of the day after you’ve already committed a lot of time to work might in itself feel like too much of a commitment.
However, with access to any number of free recipe sites, you might find that there are a lot of examples that are simple enough to have you confident about starting with. From there, you might find that your familiarity with the cooking landscape improves much more quickly than you would expect it to – perhaps even getting to the point where you feel comfortable without following a method in no time at all.