If you enjoy cooking, then time spent doing it isn’t a pure cost. Many people enjoy cooking. I happen to be one. You might turn out to be one too.
Sure, but the OP, at least, doesn’t sound like one of these people, and I doubt he’s alone.
Cooking is a useful social skill as well as a way of getting edible food for yourself. (You can invite people over for meals, which is by no means socially equivalent to inviting them out for meals.)
Even if I learned how to cook, it’s unlikely that I would end up being the best cook in my social circle. If I want eating-at-people’s-houses events to happen in general, I can subsidize the best cook in my social circle instead of cooking myself. If I personally want to be the cook to win friendship points with my friends, that might be a good strategy, but it’s probably worth thinking about whether I have other strategies that play better to my comparative advantages for winning friendship points.
Beware of simple-minded time/money tradeoff analysis where you assume the value of your time equals (or even is well approximated by) the amount you are paid. That’s a safe assumption if you actually have the option of adjusting your working hours ad lib and your behaviour is perfectly consistent, but not otherwise.
Agreed. I’m basing my current conversion rate on approximately the hourly rate I can get tutoring, and I have substantial leeway to adjust how many hours I spend tutoring. (LWers looking for extra cash who have good academic credentials and haven’t considered this possibility should do so; with good credentials and in a reasonably well-off area you can safely charge $60 an hour if not more, and you can use a service like WyzAnt to minimize the time cost of advertising your services.)
Cooking for yourself may well get you a healthier diet; you need to consider how you value your health as well as how you value your time.
Sure. This is why I no longer eat at restaurants for all of my meals; again, for health reasons, half of them consist of fruit, hard-boiled eggs, and whey protein (none of which require cooking, really; hard-boiled eggs are very easy to prepare).
Even if I learned how to cook, it’s unlikely that I would end up being the best cook in my social circle.
Most people resolve this by specializing in certain dishes. You could probably never be a better general cook than your friend’s wife who really loves cooking, but you could learn to make a single night’s dinner better than her with a small amount of practice. Just keep repeating the same appetizer, the same entree, the same two sides, and the same desert.
I have a friend who can only make Eggplant Parmesian, bacon-deviled-eggs, and chocolate covered strawberries. As long as he doesn’t host more than twice a month, nobody notices this lack of variety because each of the dishes exceeds restaurant quality. He can’t cook outside of that, but he’s still considered amazing at cooking because that’s how people’s memory works.
If I want eating-at-people’s-houses events to happen in general, I can subsidize the best cook in my social circle instead of cooking myself.
You know, this seems socially naive to me, in a way characteristic of ideallistic young introverts. People do not usually respond well if you offer to pay for stuff they would otherwise enjoy doing for free, under the right circumstances (such as reciprocal dinner invites).
But I may be wrong, give it a try and report on the results, one of us will probably learn something.
People do not usually respond well if you offer to pay for stuff they would otherwise enjoy doing for free, under the right circumstances
I think you’re right, and I think the reason you’re right is that paying a friend to cook for you introduces a social relation—and, importantly, an implicit power relation—that wasn’t there before, and that people tend to be cautious about adopting those sorts of things. If you want to pay the best cook in your social circle to cook for group events, all of a sudden that person is no longer some random friend; they’ve become your employee. Which is, among other things, a status move and one that creates asymmetric obligations.
There are ways of exchanging goods and services in most social circles without creating status implications or inflexible long-term obligations, but they’re usually somewhat less conducive to ongoing arrangements. Probably the best in this situation would be to create some sort of regular social event that requires expenditure on your part, and ask your friend to do the cooking as part of a general division of resources. For example: “Want to start going fishing every couple of weeks? I’ll drive if you cook.” Usually you’d want to do a trial run first, of course.
Sure, but the OP, at least, doesn’t sound like one of these people, and I doubt he’s alone.
Even if I learned how to cook, it’s unlikely that I would end up being the best cook in my social circle. If I want eating-at-people’s-houses events to happen in general, I can subsidize the best cook in my social circle instead of cooking myself. If I personally want to be the cook to win friendship points with my friends, that might be a good strategy, but it’s probably worth thinking about whether I have other strategies that play better to my comparative advantages for winning friendship points.
Agreed. I’m basing my current conversion rate on approximately the hourly rate I can get tutoring, and I have substantial leeway to adjust how many hours I spend tutoring. (LWers looking for extra cash who have good academic credentials and haven’t considered this possibility should do so; with good credentials and in a reasonably well-off area you can safely charge $60 an hour if not more, and you can use a service like WyzAnt to minimize the time cost of advertising your services.)
Sure. This is why I no longer eat at restaurants for all of my meals; again, for health reasons, half of them consist of fruit, hard-boiled eggs, and whey protein (none of which require cooking, really; hard-boiled eggs are very easy to prepare).
Most people resolve this by specializing in certain dishes. You could probably never be a better general cook than your friend’s wife who really loves cooking, but you could learn to make a single night’s dinner better than her with a small amount of practice. Just keep repeating the same appetizer, the same entree, the same two sides, and the same desert.
I have a friend who can only make Eggplant Parmesian, bacon-deviled-eggs, and chocolate covered strawberries. As long as he doesn’t host more than twice a month, nobody notices this lack of variety because each of the dishes exceeds restaurant quality. He can’t cook outside of that, but he’s still considered amazing at cooking because that’s how people’s memory works.
You know, this seems socially naive to me, in a way characteristic of ideallistic young introverts. People do not usually respond well if you offer to pay for stuff they would otherwise enjoy doing for free, under the right circumstances (such as reciprocal dinner invites).
But I may be wrong, give it a try and report on the results, one of us will probably learn something.
I think you’re right, and I think the reason you’re right is that paying a friend to cook for you introduces a social relation—and, importantly, an implicit power relation—that wasn’t there before, and that people tend to be cautious about adopting those sorts of things. If you want to pay the best cook in your social circle to cook for group events, all of a sudden that person is no longer some random friend; they’ve become your employee. Which is, among other things, a status move and one that creates asymmetric obligations.
There are ways of exchanging goods and services in most social circles without creating status implications or inflexible long-term obligations, but they’re usually somewhat less conducive to ongoing arrangements. Probably the best in this situation would be to create some sort of regular social event that requires expenditure on your part, and ask your friend to do the cooking as part of a general division of resources. For example: “Want to start going fishing every couple of weeks? I’ll drive if you cook.” Usually you’d want to do a trial run first, of course.
Fair enough. Instead of subsidizing I can offer to take care of logistics if they take care of cooking.
I would invite people over and pay for takeout rather than cooking, if I couldn’t cook.
Qiaochu_Yuan’s social circle and your social circle may (or may not) be too different for what one will learn to apply to the other.