As someone who is dangerously close to needing an intervention for an addiction to Flaming Hot Cheetos, I am nowhere close to what you would consider a healthy eater. Nutrition-conscious consumption and calorie-regulation were habits previously unfamiliar to me, having enjoyed grilled pork belly at 3AM on a dangerously large number of occasions. Going on a diet and fixing these unhealthy habits were goals in the back of my mind for a long time, but it was only until the COVID-19 epidemic seriously hit South Korea that I would come to realize those plans. 

Finally ditching my midnight food deliveries and learning to cook my own nourishing meals was initially a result of my determination to return to school sans the facial fat once online schooling was over. When I had first taken up cooking in late February, I assumed that school would resume in two or three weeks and thought that eating one home-cooked meal instead of binge-eating junk food all day would be a realistic path to losing weight during my stay at home. I knew from experience that going on strict diets, where I was permitted a single sweet potato and two boiled eggs a day, was simply infeasible in the long run, and I would relapse into my old habits in a matter of seconds. But I figured that trying OMAD, an abbreviation for “One Meal A Day” (a diet where an individual eats a single meal per day), in combination with my cooking would produce much better results than popular but unhealthy diets such as the IU diet, which permits the consumption of only apples, sweet potatoes, and protein shakes.

But quickly, cooking assumed a larger role than a mere dieting method in my daily life. The night before I planned to eat my kimchi pork-belly fried rice–even on a diet, I simply couldn’t give up my pork–I spent hours setting out all the dry ingredients on my kitchen countertop and making sure all of my main ingredients were in the fridge. And as I decided that my next cooking endeavor would be a caramelized-onion cheesesteak, I browsed through myriad cooking blogs and YouTube channels for the perfect recipe. I even spent a good portion of an evening peeling potatoes with a knife–apparently, my mom had thrown away our potato peeler–so that I could enjoy perfect wedge potatoes during lunch. Perhaps most shockingly, I woke up at 8AM on a Saturday to start whisking my ingredients together into the fluffiest pancake mix; on weekends, I typically wake up at 2PM.

Though I justified to myself that I had become so invested in cooking only to get the most out of my one meal every day, the truth was that I was truly enamored of the wonder of putting a recipe together. High school students all over the world have been experiencing a sense of disorganization as we attend online classes amid this global pandemic. We often don’t even know what day of the week it is because every day feels like yet another afternoon spent quarantined in our homes. So, although we once complained about the stress and lack of freedom from school before we started doing online classes, an increasing number of students began longing to go back to physical school as each week of online schooling passed by. Cooking unexpectedly provided me with the very organization and routine I was missing from school. The measurements and the clear procedures outlined in every recipe reminded me of the equally organized labs of AP Biology and the highly structured AP World History DBQ – which I actually longed to write. Cooking gave me a sense of structure and stability and consequently kept me from going insane from two months of self-isolation.

Of course, the diet – which turned out to be quite effective – and the scrumptious taste of my homecooked meals were an added bonus. But if you’re looking for a way to distract yourself as you practice social distancing, cooking might just be the solution to your problems!

Rachel Lee
Grade 11
Seoul International School