It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P I have not cooked my entire life, for the most part, but when my situation requires me to cook, then I can. I find a relatively easy recipe and I just follow the instructions. It has worked out fine for me.
> Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know
More than a billion people have successfully learned to speak Chinese, some of them very stupid. Yet here I am, struggling to remember the hanzi and the tones.
Different skills take different amounts of time and parameters to master.
Comparing learning a language to watching a video or reading a recipe and spending a few weeks adding some oil and spices in a pot or pan is ridiculous.
Sorry, I wanted to sound edgier and made my point less clear! What I wanted to convey is, it's waaaaay easier to learn a skill when you've been exposed to it since you were a baby.
"It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P "
Well, the Neanderthals cooked, so it is not exactly a rocket engineering skill ... but it is probably acquired better from other people than alone, and equipment matters as well.
If you learn to cook from your mother in a well-equipped kitchen, you will probably enjoy the process a lot more than alone with Youtube in a cheaply rented flat with one pot, one dull knife and two dented plastic plates. And if people don't enjoy some learning process, they are much more likely to drop out and resign. Especially if fast food alternatives lurk at them from their smartphones.
The best way to start cooking is probably with a knife, cutting board, an 8" or 10" skillet, and a small saucepan (i.e. little soup pot). There are pans that can work as the last two, but it helps to be able to have two pans at hand, e.g. for making rice while cooking the protein and/or vegetables, even if all you have is a single burner. And none have to be fancy. A cheap soft wood cutting board helps your cheap knife stay sharper for longer.
Outside baking, that's basically all you need, at least if you're alone. Cooking for two or especially a family is when you need more equipment as time savers and for variability, e.g. mandolin, pressure cooker, etc.
I'd venture to say this is how many people have learned to cook, and even how many avid cookers continue to cook.
If you're starting out, canned food and pasta is definitely your friend, not to mention cheap. You can start to learn to cook by boiling a pot of water for your instant Ramen, and frying an egg to toss into the bowl. Or just soft boil an egg in the boiling water and set side before doing the Ramen in the same water. Building meals around something packaged and precooked is useful and can help save money (outside beans and rice, fresh ingredients are sadly often more expensive than what you can cobble together from pantry staples).
I come from a very poor family, and I am Eastern European... so we had very "shitty" equipments. We peeled our potatoes using a knife, too. I wonder how foreign it is to others.
I have never learned to cook from anyone. I just read the recipes and/or watch some videos and that is literally it. My kitchen is not as equipped as it is in rich households.
Ordering food is ideal, but super expensive, so I personally cannot afford to do that.
Aren't you Martin Janiczek? Bro, if true, you're not helping our collective effort to resurrect "Central Europe" in colloquial use :)
We had a weird assortment of equipment as well, some dating back to Masaryk, but it was usually durable and reliable. That is why we also kept it; late stage Communism was terrible at producing durable consumer goods, while old stuff lasted for decades.
> Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know
Okay, the situation really is horrible then, wow.