Zero-Bullshit Cooking

Cooking is the culture of processing food in such a way that it becomes more easily digestible, making more nutrients and energy available to the consumer, as well as destroying harmful microbes and chemical compounds. This makes it so the cook has more free time as he doesn't have to spend his whole day chewing and gnawing, and has enough extra calories to fuel an energy-hungry brain. Voila: humanity.
 
The zeroth form of cooking is physically brutalising the ingredients, with hands, mortar and pestle, or blades. The first form of cooking is using fire to heat and thereby break down ingredients, most simply directly over the fire, as with barbecue, but also in a vessel and with liquid, as with soups and braises. The second form of cooking is using the chemical action of salt, alcohol or acid, as with pickling and massaging lemon juice into greens. The third is using bacteria to ferment ingredients, as with bread and beer. Yes, brewing is a form of cooking.
 
Cooking is about gathering the best ingredients you can, pairing them to compliment each other and fucking with them as little as possible. Because the very nature of cooking is pre-digesting ingredients, there is a very fine line between making food easier to digest and creating disgusting homogenous mush. If you are paying attention, which you certainly should be, you will see and taste this line as you approach it. Try not to cross it, but don't be afraid to get close.
 
On the same note, using advanced technology to process ingredients is almost always folly. If an ingredient needs to be run through a food processor to become usable, it's entirely possible that nature never intended it to be eaten by people. Also, we eat food for energy, so using more energy to process the food than we will get by eating it is wasteful and disrespectful to the Earth, who was nice enough to give us the food in the first place. Think long and hard about this one.
 
Cooking is an art. The medium is food. We think of taste as the most important aspect of food, and this is a good way to think, but as multi-sensory creatures, we judge food by it's appearance and smell before taste and feel. As a culinary artist, make presentation a priority, because it ultimately will effect how the food tastes.
 
Cooking is a science. Any cook worth his salt takes proper nutrition seriously. In addition, using local and seasonal ingredients is the only truly wise way of cooking, because if we destroy our ecosystems by wasting energy on ingredients which are not local, seasonal and edible, we will no longer have anything to cook with. If you care about food, study ecology.

Cuisine springs from both the art and science of cooking. Bioregions have their own traditions for cooking no by chance but by natural selection. Warmer regions spice their food liberally because the spices have anti-bacterial properties: advantageous when your food tends to spoil more quickly. Other regional cuisines are based on native species, lifestyle, and so on. I therefore feel that mixing cuisines is fine as long as you take these variables into consideration. Cooking with ingredients grown on another continent just because you can is rather disrespectful. However, growing a crop in your backyard which has been imported may be somewhat better if it does well in the climate. I like to think of this process as 'breeding' new cuisines.

Cooking is power. As was alluded to in the first paragraph, cooking is the only thing that separates us from other animals. Beavers build. Termites garden. Birds sing. Only humans cook. Bread and booze built the pyramids. Needless to say, with great cooking comes great responsibility.

Finally, and crucially, cooking is both easy and deeply satisfying. It takes a little practice to make things that are pleasing to the senses, but making healthy meals with whatever's on hand will elevate your day from 'meh' to 'yes life satisfaction'. Along with cooking's sister, gardening, every human should have a basic knowledge of this invaluable, wonderful way of life.