I, like many college students, am still learning to be an adult. I’m still learning how to manage money, time, and energy, all of which are resources one has to use wisely in their life. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, though, it’s that cooking and eating good food is worth a little bit extra of all of those things.

I spent the first year of my college experience like most other freshmen do: in a dorm, eating food from the campus dining hall. After growing up with two particularly wonderful cooks for parents, this was a culture shock to say the least. Until then, food had always tasted good; all of a sudden, I was having to essentially force myself to eat meals.

Thankfully, after my freshman year I transferred schools and ended up living in an apartment with a tiny but functional kitchen. I lived too far away from campus for a dining plan to make any sense, so I started cooking my own meals. This was a new and transformative experience for me, and one that I’m very grateful for. There’s a lot of reasons why it’s so important to cook for yourself if you can in college, but here are the main ones.

The Health Factor

At first it was a chore, something I just had to do when I got in from class because I needed to eat, but eventually, I started to love it. The dishes I was making were simple, but they tasted good and were full of the freshest ingredients I could get my hands on. I know exactly what I’m putting into my body when I make a home cooked meal, and it actually inspires me to be healthy in other ways, like going to the gym and taking care of myself in all the ways that I can.

Cooking also helped me to control my diet, i.e. what nutrients I was getting. I am anemic, so it’s very important for me to get enough iron in my diet (even though I also take a supplement). Making dishes with more green vegetables and incorporating red meat into my diet once a week were both ways I came up with to support that need, and since those are some pretty loose guidelines, I could be creative with what dishes I actually made.

The "Adulting" Factor

That first year, the recipes I was making were relatively simple with only a few ingredients, partially due to my limited skills and partially due to the fact that my workspace was very tiny. This past summer, though, I moved into a new apartment with a nicer kitchen, and my options opened up. While I had been afforded some creativity before, my new larger kitchen and proximity to campus and the grocery store meant that I could explore more and more complicated recipes. To me, this almost feels like growing up, and it’s a really liberating sensation. Making my own food gives me a sense of independence that I never had before I learned to cook; I’m relying only on myself (and sometimes a select few other people), and that sense of responsibility feels really good.

The Social Factor

Making food can of course also be a social activity. Cooking with and for friends and family is a wonderful bonding experience, and the positive effects of preparing and eating meals together have been millennia in the making. Cooking with a significant other is an especially rewarding experience, and the feeling of working as a team is so wonderful and valuable. As I’ve gotten better at it, I’ve realized the value of cooking with others because of what they can bring to the table (literally). Discussing meals I’ve made with friends has led to perfecting several of my favorite recipes.

Cooking in college is so important because not only is the food better than the dining hall and cheaper than the restaurants, but it also has almost nothing to do with the things we learn during the academic day, and so it becomes more of an escape than a chore. You can tailor what you make to your individual tastes as well, so you really want to eat the things on your plate.

It benefits your health, your taste buds, your sense of responsibility, and, over the long term, your bank account. Learning to cook is a skill that you’ll carry through your entire life, and it can only get better as you learn more and more about it. For all of these reasons, it’s so worth those limited resources of time, energy, and money, because you’ll never regret making that delicious dinner.