Five Years Later, The Pandemic Cooking Habit That Stuck

A recipe for calm

As if we’ve all traveled through a collective time warp, it has now been five years since the pandemic began. For as much as I remember about the long days with two toddlers, the Zoom preschooling, and the endless neighborhood walks, I mostly remember the food.

My thoughts about cooking were my constant companions throughout 2020 (in addition to the actual constant companions of my family, stuck together in our home for months on end). From How am I going to get groceries this week? to Is there anything to eat that I haven’t made 100 times?, I thought about food because I needed to and also because I didn’t want to think about anything else.

Photo by LAUREN GRAY on Unsplash

In the years that followed, I became enamored with cooking and burnt out of it in a continuous ebb and flow. I poured what energy I had left over after nonstop parenting into meal planning (a necessity to make the most of infrequent grocery hauls) and cooking, filling any empty crevices of my mind with our next meal before something else had a chance to work its way in. I cooked day after day until I couldn’t think about food anymore and then, I couldn’t tell you what we ate. Probably takeout when it was available; pasta when it was not.

Cookbooks became a surprising source of solace. If I woke up in the night, I’d often go downstairs and pull one off the shelf, flipping through the colorful, aspirational pages. When so much felt out of balance, there was something empowering about seeing manageable possibilities. I could make this! Or this! I’d think, dog-earing pages that looked like an appealing dinner everyone might eat. Here were so many options for accomplishable tasks in an uncontrollable world. As far as distractions go, cooking felt like one I could make time and energy for. Sure, I could take up painting or knitting, but we would still need to eat. If I had to feed myself and my family anyway, it may as well be good.

I never embraced the sourdough trend, but I got close. I went through a substantial challah-making phase, finally learning how to use the dough hook that came with a Kitchen Aid mixer we had received as an engagement gift years before. I spent days making a single batch of Swedish cardamom buns. I perfected my family recipe for lamb stew. I was determined to home-bake my son’s second birthday cake, topped with a chocolate cream cheese frosting that is still, to-date, the best thing I have ever eaten for dessert.

While my newly minted two-year-old would have been just as happy with a tub of Pillsbury icing, something drew me towards making elaborate, novel, or just comforting foods throughout the pandemic. Apparently, I wasn’t alone. The food industry saw increases in people exploring new recipes and ingredients during this time. Grocery stores couldn’t keep flour in stock fast enough to meet the boom in baking interest. Faced with high stress and encouraged to stay at home, so many of us hunkered in our kitchens.

And there’s some science to this. Research shows that “everyday creative activity” is associated with feeling better. Engaging with something creative on any given day boosts overall positivity. While certainly not all (or most) of our meals will be Instagram-worthy, food offers three opportunities each day to think a little differently and play around, while also accomplishing something that needs to get done.

Moreover, the hands-on tasks required by work in the kitchen carry calming benefits, in more ways than one. The manual labor of cooking can be soothing, as doing something mindless (e.g. repetitive chopping) gives our brains a break from thinking. On the other hand, the many layers of information involved in planning and executing a recipe (remembering ingredients and following multiple steps) engage our working memory. Fostering working memory skills can boost our ability to manage emotions, as both tap into attention control.

As so many of us instinctively knew, the physical and mental acts of cooking can be a balm for the stressed-out mind. The relentlessness of pandemic home-cooking taught me that the labor of meals can be overwhelming. Yet, it also left me with the habit of leaning into this task, rather than checking out of it. While we are thankfully no longer in the depths of that era, there is no shortage of uncertainty. Five years after March 2020, heading to the kitchen or grocery store is still my favorite practical distraction. Whether I am diving into a weekend baking project, meticulously mapping out dinners for the week, or just enjoying the sensory experience of trying a new spicy sauce on my eggs, there’s good reason to turn this necessary daily chore into something creative.