What Are You Doing? And Why? by Abby Franquemont

Someone asked me the other day, “What are you doing?” “Oh, I’m cooking food,” I explained, “from raw ingredients. See, these materials here, if I use the right steps, turn into my lunch.” He wanted to know why I’d do that; I explained that I like eating. “But,” he said, “why don’t you just buy food? You know they have restaurants, right?”

“This way I get what I really want and really need,” I told him. He relayed to me that he’d been told his grandmother used to cook, but now that everyone can just go out for fast-food burgers, nobody he knows has bothered for a long time. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” he said. “You must have a lot of patience.”