The agricultural-industrial complex is the great promulgator of non-cooking—heat this package, pour out this frozen stir-fry, open this can. For those of us who want to be done with industrial agriculture, cooking is at least half the solution. But cooking after generations of the microwave-and-frozen-dinner era has its challenges.

Finding the time to cook is perhaps one of the greatest challenges. But time is really a matter of your priorities. One of my customers has seven young children, home schools them, and still has the time to make meals from scratch—and that includes making her own cheese, butter, and yogurt, and grinding grain for bread. Her family is one of the happiest and healthiest I have seen. Most of the people who complain about lacking the time to cook still find an hour or two a day for television. Once you get the hang of it cooking can be as relaxing and far more rewarding than watching a couple of hours of TV. 

But in the younger generations (boomers and beyond), there is also a sense of fear. In selling food to people, one of the greatest fears I come across is "How do I cook it?" And that question usually comes in regards to fairly simple products like lamb chops or whole chickens. My advice, one novice to another, is to get a good cookbook like Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and look for meals that take half an hour or less to make. If you have some random ingredients around, you could also do a search for relevant recipes on epicurious.com. There are many, many recipes there from Gourmet and Bon Appetit, but be warned that some of them are too complex or require ingredients too exotic to be useful. Once you have thoroughly followed the instructions for several meals, you should begin to get a hang of the fundamentals and can start improvising.  With improvising you will have reached the heart of good cooking and sustainability—using what you have to make delicious food.