What are the objectives of cooking food?

Though the main objective is to make the food edible, yet there are other reasons for doing so such as:

1. To make the food attractive and palatable: Cooking makes the food look attractive and also renders it more tasteful than the uncooked food. More sight of a well-cooked and pleasant looking food activates our digestive enzymes and makes us feel hungry.
2. To make the food digestible: Cooking makes the food soft and tender which makes it easy and quick to digest. For example, after cooking carbohydrates present in food become easier to digest to a certain extent. Similarly proteins coagulate on cooking which makes the digestion simple. It is due to this reason that soft and well-cooked food is recommended for people in diseased conditions, as their digestive system is weak.
3. To introduce variety in meals: Variety can be brought about in meals easily by using different methods of cooking. For example, one single foodstuff like potato can be cooked by using different methods into a number of dishes and thus add variety to the meals, i.e. potatoes can be cooked as potato subzi, potato chips, potato chaat, potato halwa, baked potatoes etc., simply by changing the methods of cooking.
4. To enhance the availability of some nutrients: For example, cooking destroys trypsin inhibitor present in protein foods. This makes the trypsin freely available to the body. Similarly starch is more easily available after cooking.
5. To destroy micro-organism: Cooking of food destroys the micro-organism present in them to a large extent, thus, making it safe for consumption. Many foodstuffs like milk, meat, fish, can harbor certain disease-producing microorganism thus making the person sick on consumption of such foodstuff. Raw milk may have microorganism responsible for causing tuberculosis and typhoid and such milk if consumed raw can be harmful. Meat especially pork, contain eggs of worms which can cause infestation in the body. Fortunately, these microorganisms are destroyed by usual cooking procedures, thus making the food safe. Another advantage of destroying microorganisms is that the food can be kept for a longer time i.e. its shelf life is increased e.g. pasteurized milk.
6. Increasing consumption of food: Cooking improves the texture and makes the food chewable. Improvement in texture and flavour by cooking increases the consumption of food to meet our nutritional requirement.
7. Concentrate nutrients: This may be due to removal of moisture or using combination of foods or due to cooking procedures, e.g. sweets like rabri, khoa burfi.

Thus cooking of food is very important, as it increases digestibility, appeals to palate and destroys microorganisms.