I went through the pandemic and came out with a passion for making tasty things. It is probably a result of the combination of my being cheap, hungry for tasty things, and hungry to understand how things are made. But yeah I can cook.

Learning to cook takes time, energy, and willingness to endure repeated failure (or just a sub-par result). In contrast, packaged food requires only money and has the bonus to some of being approximately the same every time. One also needs a kitchen to muck about in, and a lot of my peers haven’t had access to that after moving out and may not have been too involved with cooking before that.