What counts as cooking? In defense of the store-bought sauce | josh iza.ac

“I didn’t cook dinner last night,” my sister mentioned to me the other week.

She has a one-year-old and a three-year-old, a combination of ages that practically guarantees a<br>baseline level of perpetual exhaustion.

“Oh!” I replied. “Wait.” I tried to rationalize what that meant. My sister sounded too blasé to<br>imply that they had all simply given up and gone hungry (and if that was indeed the case, it was<br>an odd way to bring it up). “So… you ordered Uber Eats?”

“No, I made toast with scrambled eggs.”

This didn’t make any sense to me. “But that is cooking! You cooked!”

“I guess,” she countered. “But not from scratch — it wasn’t cooking. I didn’t cook like you cook.”

I have been thinking about this conversation for a while now. Why didn’t this count as cooking?

At some point society collectively decided (when I wasn’t paying attention) that cooking only really<br>counts if it involves chopping up aromatics, blooming spices, and dirtying half the pots in the<br>kitchen. If it comes together in under ten minutes, relies on a store-bought shortcut, or doesn’t<br>match the idealised family dinner, we demote it. We didn’t cook, we merely assembled.

But anything you make to feed yourself or your family is cooking. It doesn’t need to be fancy, and<br>it certainly doesn’t need to be from scratch.

When did this happen?

My sister, my mum, and I have always been massive fans of MasterChef Australia. During the years<br>we all lived at home, we would organize our nights around MasterChef, arguing about what we would<br>do with the mystery box ingredients, shouting at the contestants during the team challenges1, and in awe of the<br>complexity of the pressure tests.

It is phenomenal television, but watching it for almost twenty years can subtly recalibrate your<br>perception of what a Tuesday night dinner should entail. When you spend an hour every evening2, watching amateur home cooks frantically trying to<br>execute a flawless ballotine of chicken, complete with a perfectly clarified consommé, micro-herb<br>garnishes, and a savory tuile before the clock runs out, your internal benchmark for cooking<br>quietly shifts3.

When the show first premiered in 2009, it fundamentally<br>changed the country’s food culture,<br>triggering what the media dubbed the “MasterChef effect”. Whenever a previously niche ingredient or<br>specific cut of meat — like pork belly, beef cheeks, or pomegranate molasses — was featured on an<br>episode, major supermarkets would famously sell out of it the very next day.<br>The franchise elevated the everyday vernacular of the Australian home cook, injecting<br>restaurant-industry terms like “plating up,” “sous-vide,” and “hero-ing an ingredient” into<br>suburban kitchens. Australian cafe menus were permanently altered, with favourites like eggs on<br>toast and smashed avocado making way for unique fusion creations such as slow cooked beef brisket<br>rendang benedict, with curry leaf hollandaise (and, inevitably, dollops of fresh coriander oil,<br>because nothing says breakfast like an herb extraction).

I actually had the rendang brisket benedict as described above at Cafe Yoka in Perth, and it was legitimately delicious. I quite like the Masterchef-ification of Australian cafes.

While it was a brilliant, much-needed celebration of Australia’s diverse, multicultural food scene, it<br>also accidentally cemented a new, intimidating standard. It created an illusion that amateur<br>cooking was no longer just about sustenance; it was about executing professional-grade gastronomy.

You can actually see this shift if you revisit past MasterChef seasons. The food in the early<br>years was decidedly simpler. The season one finale famously finished with a whole chicken<br>challenge: Julie Goodwin made a Sunday roast, and Poh Ling Yeoh made Hainanese chicken rice. This<br>escalation didn’t go unnoticed in our house — mum would frequently annoy my sister and me in later<br>seasons by despairing at the lack of actual home cooks. “These are not home cooks!” she would<br>mutter darkly at the screen. “I bet they have secret restaurant experience.”4

Add to this the modern aesthetic of the Instagram and TikTok kitchen — gorgeous, cinematic reels of<br>people fermenting their own hot sauce, folding laminated pastry dough, or making insanely intricate packed lunches for their kids —<br>and the kitchen is no longer a place of domestic utility, but a stage. A place of competitive sport and lifestyle aesthetics.

When you are saturated in this media, you begin to compare your chaotic, weeknight survival tactics<br>to someone else’s performative hobby. If you aren’t making the pasta or tortillas by hand5, the inner critic whispers, you aren’t really cooking.

It wasn’t always this way. For most of human history, cooking was an inescapable daily chore,<br>primarily shouldered by women.

When the post-war convenience food boom hit in the 1950s and 60s, it promised a revolution. Products<br>like jarred sauces, canned soups, and boxed...