Cooking is good for hacking.

In an effort to avoid leaving my house even less than I already do, so I can just sit around and write code all day, I recently began cooking all of my own food. I don't know why I didn't start doing this sooner.

I now feel as though every hacker should be encouraged to cook. You know how you like to use a text editor to write your code, so you know it's a lot cleaner and more efficient? Yeah, well, cooking is a lot like that. When you are able to select all of the ingredients you want to use, you can be sure that you're using the right ingredients, and you eventually get really good at a bunch of techniques.

This really changes the way you look at food when you eat it anywhere else, or when you eat processed/packaged foods. For example, I've grown used to mixing fresh yogurt from Greece with really good, locally-grown strawberry preserves from up the road (I live in Southern California); I now look at the packaged strawberry yogurts, and wonder to myself, "do they use really good strawberries? How do they keep them fresh?" (1. They don't; 2. Preservatives.) When you have to think about everything that goes into your food, you start to eat, and live, a lot healthier.

Cooking also gives you some great, regularly scheduled breaks from coding and your monitor, which gives you time to THINK, which is likely to improve whatever you're working on; so yeah, it takes up a little bit of time, but it's the best sort of time, and it's probably less than the time you'd have to spend waiting for food / going and getting it. So yeah, highly recommended. I assume I'm not the only one here who has discovered this? It would be great if we could get some sort of movement going behind this, and hopefully put an end to the idea that a good hacker should live on energy drinks and junk food.