Teaching Kids to Cook: Why I Let My 3-Year-Old Run the Kitchen

The other day, my family reorganized our kitchen.

I know this is not my most riveting opening, but bear with me. Have some faith in Farmer Josh.

We installed some pantry shelves in a hallway nook, which opened up space to move all of our dishes onto the open shelves in the corner of the kitchen.

Juniper, our three-year-old, now knows where everything lives, can reach it all, and has assumed some real responsibilities. Putting dishes away, setting the table, that kind of thing. As far as teaching kids to cook goes, this isn't a bad starting point.

She loves it. She's proud.

She occasionally goes EXTREMELY toddler level mad with power if you intrude in her little dish fiefdom.

I've been thinking a lot about her devotion to these chores.

The "frictionless" trap

We live in a world obsessed with "frictionless" everything. Optimize your calendar. Automate your meals. Subscribe and save. DoorDash it. Let the algorithm decide. Efficiency Uber Alles.

I get the appeal. I run a business, I have a to-do list that makes me feel like barfing, I'm familiar with the exhausting hamster wheel of modernity. Saving time matters.

But I think society has lost the plot when it comes to our daily lives, and especially our kids. Ya know, the stuff we're supposedly trying to have more time for......

There's a real cost to removing all the mundane responsibility from a child's life. The kid who never cooks doesn't just grow up unable to cook. They grow up without the confidence of making something, without taking part in a daily ritual that has existed for all of human history, and without the specific joy of learning to take care of themselves.

Of course there are plenty of ways for kids to make and do things that aren't cooking.

But trying to optimize away the ancient daily routines of human life (cooking, cleaning, setting the table, etc.) feels like a recipe for creating really helpless people.

And let's be honest: what are the odds all these time savings get redirected toward some higher calling?

If I were a gambling man, I'd say most of that time gets funneled straight into our tech overlords' entertainment slop. Anyone wanna give me odds?

To riff on the great tech philosopher Rick Pitino: "Michelangelo isn't walking through that door. William Shakespeare isn't walking through that door. Beethoven isn't walking through that door."

The archetypal spoiled and helpless rich kid used to be a cautionary tale. Now a bunch of billionaire technocrats are doing their best to democratize that experience for everyone. Huzzah for progress!

Why teaching kids to cook beats teaching them to "save time"

The rhythm of dinner in our house, with a toddler involved in choosing the cut, pulling beef out of the chest freezer, patting it dry, salting it chaotically, getting distracted 37 times while setting the table, is not inefficient. It's the whole point. We used to call this being human.

Does she occasionally salt two square inches of a steak into oblivion while leaving the rest completely bland? Absolutely. Every time.

Will plates and cups get broken? Most certainly.

But she's doing it. She's proud of it. And she does it even when she's not particularly in the mood. Which is kind of an important life skill if you aspire to anything beyond playing video games in exchange for Nourishment Pellets, or whatever Peter Thiel has planned for us....

What we did not expect to hear from customers

This is actually one of the things we hear most from customers who have kids. The chest freezer full of beef becomes a household fixture, and the kids (of all ages) get seriously involved. They know what cuts are in there. They're thrilled to learn how to cook them. They start taking ownership. (They also become the most honest beef critics in the house, but that's a whole other story.)

That's not something we anticipated when we started this. We were slinging beef shares long before I became a parent who thought about this stuff regularly.

It just seems to be what happens when real food is accessible and the adults in the house treat cooking like it's fun and important.

Almost like it speaks to something innate in us that modern corporate society is desperate to minimize 🤔

Which is why there's never been a better time to stock the freezer, hand a toddler a salt shaker, and just see what happens....

How a chest freezer ends up being part of teaching kids to cook

If you're curious how the freezer thing actually works at our place, the short version: a Half Beef Share comes with a free chest freezer, the freezer becomes Mission Control, the kids go to it the same way they'd go to the pantry, and dinner becomes a thing they're a part of instead of a thing that just appears in front of them.

It's not a parenting hack. It's just what happens when there's actually a freezer full of real food in the house and the adults aren't precious about it.

P.S. Teaching your child cooking and responsibility, having the best beef in the neighborhood, and spiting Peter Thiel are all valid and legitimate reasons to reserve a Beef Share. Whichever one speaks to you most....