Cooking Doesn't Scale

There's a question people ask when someone says they've stopped cooking at home: do you not like it? The assumption is that cooking is either something you enjoy or something you don't — a preference, a personality trait, a lifestyle choice. The arithmetic behind the question goes unexamined.

Cooking doesn't scale the way we assume it does.

When you cook for two, you make decisions. What sounds good tonight? How much time do we have? The meal is something chosen. When you cook for six, you make calculations. What will everyone eat? How do I time four things at once? How much is enough? The decisions are still there, but they're buried under logistics. The task hasn't grown — it has transformed.

And yet the language stays the same. "Do you cook at home?" Yes or no. As if feeding two people and feeding six people were variations of the same activity rather than categorically different ones.

What makes this harder to see is that the growth is gradual and seemingly joyful. A family expands. Children get older and eat more. Each step feels like abundance. Nobody frames the arrival of a third child as "your cooking workload just increased by fifty percent." And so the accumulation goes unnamed — until one evening, standing in front of the stove with four burners going, you find yourself thinking: I used to enjoy this.

The escape routes don't scale either. Takeout for one costs almost nothing. Takeout for six costs as much as a meal out, which itself costs enough to require a decision. The options that exist for smaller households — the casual detour, the impulse choice, the "let's just grab something" — become logistically and financially significant. The very moments when cooking feels most impossible are the moments when the alternatives cost the most.

This is not a story about discipline or preference. It's a story about a threshold that gets crossed quietly, without ceremony, while everyone is busy being grateful for the people around the table.

The question isn't whether you like cooking.
The question is how many people you're cooking for — and whether that number still fits the version of yourself who answered yes.