Lucky for me after my first marriage broke up and I had two signs 3-5 to take care of I learned fast and am now considered quite a good cook.
That would be sons, not signs. :-)
You sound like my husband. He did the majority of the cooking for the first few years of our lives together and is a fabulous cook!
I think my being raised in the "TV Dinner" generation had something to do with it. Mom popped plastic covered plates into the oven and out came dinner.
I've moved away from all that. Started slow; making one meal over and over until I perfected it. Then branched out into other meals. Then experimenting, changing recipes. All fresh; I now hate frozen foods, hate cooking frozen foods.
It's like everything else; the more you do it, the easier it is. My favorite days are Sundays, where I can plan all week what I'm going to cook and take great care in preparing it.
Being taught to cook involves more than just putting something in a pot or pan. It starts with knowing when food is ripe and/or fresh. Why there are so many different cuts of meat and types of bread and cheese and why some things go together and some don’t.
It also involves knowing which vitamins and minerals are in which food and which of those break down during heating and which ones should be cooked to give a person the best benefit for their health. If a mom (ideally) or a dad knows these things because they were taught them, then it is very painless to teach it over the course of a childhood.
As some posters have said they didn’t learn the easy part (putting food in a pan and heating it)until they married, so unless they are dedicated to learning the other stuff and simultaneously teaching it to their kids, the next generation will grow up knowing less.
My mom didn’t garden, so I didn’t learn it. Starting from scratch, at my age, to learn backyard farming is overwhelming to me.