the art of cooking like you give a damn
reclaiming food as ritual in a world addicted to convenience
There’s nothing sacred about hitting a button on your phone and having food show up 23 minutes later in a plastic bag. We all do it—but let’s not pretend it’s nourishing. It’s a transaction. A convenience. A way to stay fed while staying detached. And when done habitually, it has the same impact on the soul as binging Netflix or scrolling TikTok for two hours: fast, cheap dopamine that leaves you emptier than you started.
We’ve outsourced one of the most ancient human rituals—the preparation of food—to a supply chain optimized for speed, not intimacy. It’s no wonder we feel disconnected. From our bodies. From our rhythms. From the things that used to anchor us in time and place.
Cooking, when done like you give a damn, is a return.
To self.
To presence.
To the sacred in the mundane.
It’s how we remember that we still know how to create with our hands—not just with our thumbs.
And when you bring that kind of intention into the kitchen, something shifts.
The food tastes better.
The chaos quiets down.
The kitchen becomes a site of coherence—not burden, not performance. Just real presence.
Most people treat cooking like a chore. Something to get through. Something to minimize. The entire food tech industry is built on that assumption: that cooking is a burden and your time is better spent elsewhere.
But what if cooking wasn’t a task? What if it was a ritual?
I taught myself how to cook—not because I wanted to be a chef, but because I wanted to feel capable. Grounded. Able to nourish myself in a way that wasn’t reliant on processed shortcuts or flavorless, overpriced delivery.
I started with HelloFresh and Martha Stewart meal kits—just to learn the basics. I didn’t grow up cooking. But I understood systems. And cooking is just a system. Timing, preparation, balance. Once I learned that, I ditched the recipes. I read Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and started to understand the actual mechanics—what salt does to meat, how acid lifts a sauce, why heat behaves differently in oil versus water.
I learned how to sear, sauté, deglaze. I learned the timing of a pan sauce and how to know when chicken’s done without cutting into it. I learned how to multitask in a way that calms, not overwhelms.
From there, it became intuitive. I almost never measure anything. I go by vibe. By taste. By what my body feels like it wants. Lots of garlic. Lots of acidity. Spice that opens the sinuses. Herbs that linger.
The act of cooking became a kind of moving meditation. A way to anchor my attention in something tactile. It required me to slow down. To listen. To smell. To taste. To use my senses, all of them, to enjoy the quiet, sensual, deeply human act of transforming raw ingredients into something beautiful—and deliciously satiating.
Cooking isn’t performance. It’s presence. But for a brief moment, I forgot that.
I started a little account called colorpop kitchen. It was meant to be a fun creative outlet—just food photos, pretty plates, recipe shares. But it didn’t last long. Because I realized quickly: I didn’t want to create content around food. I just wanted to cook.
I like searing the perfect filet. Roasting sweet potatoes until their edges crackle. Washing herbs. Smashing garlic. Zesting lemons until my fingers smell like summer.
The act of arranging flowers for the shot, of plating a dish for aesthetics, of pausing to take ten pictures before eating—it sucked all the joy out of it. It was no longer about the food. It was about the image. And in that shift, the ritual collapsed.
Now, I only take pictures if something happens to look beautiful. I might snap a photo and post it on 𝕏 if I’m in the mood. But there’s no production. No staging. It’s casual. Honest.
But most of the time I just eat it—quietly, gratefully, while it’s still hot.
Because that’s what it’s for.
That return—to cooking without the performative layer—was a reset. It reminded me that cooking is one of the only remaining creative mediums that requires full presence. You can’t phone it in. You can’t scroll while you’re searing a filet. You have to be there.
We talk a lot about mindfulness. About getting into flow. But most people’s days are structured around avoidance. We avoid silence, stillness, hunger, emotion—anything that pulls us inward.
Cooking, if you let it, becomes a bridge back to yourself.