Cooking is one of the most essential skills for independent living. However, I’ve found that most college students prefer to order their food. It’s convenient and with the financial, social and educational stresses of college, it makes sense that it is more relied upon. We work hard to be where we are, so we’ll do anything to make school a bit easier.  

The problem with this convenience is that it’s also expensive. The average fast food meal for one person is close to $10. You could spend $5 for a whole chicken and another $2 for noodles and have enough to last at least a week. Cooking makes the most financial sense. Not to mention meal plans are incredibly expensive. In the long-run, learning to cook makes the most economic sense. 

Though sometimes the people you hang around can influence eating habits. College is the place where you make lifelong friends. Friendships can become stronger through food: you talk, you vent your frustrations and you laugh. 

However, some friends will feel compelled to go out and spend money on fast food or restaurants. So the pressure to go along with your friends’ wishes to eat out might be unhelpful to your financial crisis. 

But if you cook for or with those friends, they might change their minds.  It’s even more fun when friends cook with each other.  People come together to enjoy good food. I suppose it doesn’t matter if the food was cooked by you or Ronald McDonald if you’re having fun with the people who matter most. 

Sometimes people just think it’s easier to go to McDonald’s at three in the morning than to cook a meal.  With papers, exams and internships, who has time to cook meals? Unfortunately for students, classwork takes up so much of our time that we pull all nighters to finish papers that we procrastinate on doing. 

We can’t even sleep, much less cook a meal. Which leads us back to why many students order food instead of cook.  

But I think cooking is very important to life skills and it will be beneficial to people who want to continue cooking, and to the people who need to learn how to cook to succeed in life. I can’t tell you how many of my friends come over to my house because my mom taught me how to cook.  Other than the basic macaroni and cheese, peanut butter and jelly sandwich and frozen pizza, most of the people I know don’t know how to make anything else.  

So I suppose cooking is important to only a handful of people. If you can afford to order your food, then, by all means, go ahead.

But cooking is a good way to save your money and improve your essential life skills. You don’t have to be a professional chef, like Guy Fieri, to cook in college. Just having the basic cooking skills is enough to benefit your life and improve the independence you are supposed to be learning in college.