DPT--Cook at Home

While I was cooking dinner tonight, I thought, you know, there are probably lots of people in our country who don't do this very often. Cooking and eating your meals at home (or in the case of lunch, taking leftovers from last night's dinner) is a habit many Americans have fallen out of.

• Cooking at home will save you an armload of money. Imagine a breakfast buffet for $15.95--can you really eat $15.95 worth of food at one of these buffets? For that amount of money you could buy three dozen eggs, ten pounds of potatoes, a dozen danishes, five loaves of bread, and a watermelon, and feed the entire neighborhood for what it would cost for one person to eat breakfast at this place!
• Cooking at home can reduce the possibility of getting sick. Although it doesn't happen often, there are cases of food poisoning and hepatitis caused by poor cleanliness habits in restaurants.
• When you cook at home, you know what you are eating. Who knows what is put in your food at restaurants--TV news exposes have shown everything from hot dog vendors reusing hot dogs that had been kept warm for up to 16 hours, to stale, rotting food being served in supposedly "fancy" restaurants. Yuck. Ditto with all of the extra oil, sugar, MSG and other items used to enhance the taste of food to the detriment of your health.
• Cooking at home will allow you to eat more vegetables. Restaurants, especially the fast food kind, rarely provide enough vegetables to keep even a rabbit alive. If you eat at these places everyday, having fried potatoes as your sole vegetable is not good for your health.
• Cooking at home is good practice. During a disaster, restaurants and even grocery stores may be closed for an extended period of time. What you will be eating will be what you will be cooking. If you don't even know the basics of cooking, your food experience during a disaster--the time when you need the comfort of good home cooking the most--will be dismal.