Before college, my mom made pretty much all of my food for me: dinner every night and a boxed lunch for school. By the time I reached my senior year of high school, my repertoire of cooking skills included sandwiches, eggs, and cereal. I could not imagine making the extravagant meals my mother made, and more than that, I rarely thought about learning to cook. Sure, when I watched a cooking show I thought it’d be awesome to make real food, but I didn’t have any actual drive to obtain those skills.

Once I went to college, I spent my freshmen year eating almost every meal in the dining hall or in the on-campus café. I didn’t have any need to cook, nor did I have the opportunity and that never really bothered me. So when I decided to study abroad the second semester of my sophomore year and learned that I would be cooking all of my own meals, I got a little nervous.

When I arrived in Ireland, I was completely overwhelmed. I felt like I was going to starve for the first two weeks. I didn’t know what groceries to buy, what to cook, or how to make it. I know this sounds strange, but for my first few weeks in Ireland, it was like I was having a mental overload. So much was new that it took me a while to process how I was going to make life work while I was abroad. Finally, I started making ham and egg sandwiches that I ate every day for about four weeks straight.

But eventually, by a miracle, I started making real meals. OK, nothing extravagant like my mother’s meals, and nothing even comparable to the large dinners my roommate Kyle would make for the apartment every so often, but eventually I wasn’t so intimidated by cooking. Prior to Ireland, I thought that every meal a person made just magically came out perfectly. Part of the reason why I was reluctant to even try to cook is because I feared messing it up. But by allowing myself to mess up and try new things, I gained a lot of confidence through cooking. Something about making your own food brings a sense of pride to a person.

Making a meal (no matter how small or plain) takes a work; it’s not just a ready-made dinner that is handed to you. You have to take the thoughtful time to prepare it. Taking time on something and working at it until you become better brings confidence to a person and a pride that you can take care of yourself. And in my own experience, even though the meals I made were simple, they tasted that much better because I had made them.

Even beyond just the actual preparation of the meal, food brings people together. I felt my roommates and I grew a lot closer by having “family dinners.” This experience in Ireland made me look at food in a different way and especially made me feel more passionate about the food I eat today.

A large part of American culture has become centered around food service and even the meals that people prepare they want to prepare quickly. But I think this is a mistake. I think we as Americans need to take pride in what we are eating again.

Making a meal for yourself can bring an amazing amount of confidence and pride to a person and we as an American have started to lose that pride. Food, the stuff that is going into our bodies, should not be passed over as a low priority subject. Taking pride in your food and its preparation is to take pride in yourself. It seems to me there is a sense in America that the food your eating doesn’t really matter, that the only real difference between foods is healthy foods and junk foods, but that’s not true. Food is as much a part of our culture and a part of us as individuals as the clothing we wear or the places we work. Whether we perceive it or not, the food we eat and how we prepare it will shape us, so we might as well take some pride in it.