Cooking

Everyone has some relationship with cooking, whether they love it or avoid it. These questions range from simple preferences about favorite dishes to bigger conversations about food traditions, cooking skills, and how our relationship with food is changing.

Questions are organized by level from beginner to advanced. A printable PDF of all the questions is available at the bottom of the page.

Beginner (A1-A2)

1. How often do you cook? What do you usually make?
2. How good are you at cooking? How did you learn?
3. What are some things that you can cook?
4. What dish or food are you best at cooking?
5. Who is a better cook, your mother or your grandmother? What are their best dishes?
6. Are cooking shows popular in your country? Do you watch any cooking shows?
7. What is the hardest thing to cook? What makes it so difficult?
8. Does your father cook? What does he usually make?
9. Who is the best cook you know? What do they make that you love?
10. What do you cook when you have guests?
11. What’s in your refrigerator right now?
12. Do you use a cookbook or recipes online? Which ones do you like?
13. What kitchen tool do you use the most? What do you use it for?
14. What snacks do you like to make at home?
15. What do you usually eat for dinner? Do you cook it yourself?

Elementary (A2)

1. Do you think you can cook better than your mother?
2. Would you like to be a chef? Why?
3. What is a traditional dish in your culture that takes a long time to prepare? When do people usually make it?
4. Do you prefer cooking with gas or electric? Why?
5. Is there a dish you want to learn how to cook? Why that one?
6. Have you ever taken a cooking class? What did you learn?
7. Who taught you how to cook? What did they teach you first?
8. Have you ever cooked food from another country? How did it go?
9. What ingredients do you always have at home? Why those ones?
10. What’s the worst cooking mistake you’ve ever made? Tell me about it.
11. Do you cook alone or with other people? What’s good about that?

Intermediate (B1)

1. Is it important for husbands to know how to cook? Why or why not?
2. If you had your own personal chef, what meal would you ask for most?
3. How hard is it to become a chef? What do you have to do to become a chef?
4. Do you think meal kits and delivery services are making people better or worse at cooking? Why?
5. Should children learn how to cook at school? Why or why not?
6. What do you think makes someone a really good cook? Give me some examples.
7. Is it better to cook a few dishes really well or to try cooking many different things? What’s good about each?
8. Do you follow recipes exactly or change them? Why?
9. What dishes from your country often confuse visitors? What confuses them about those dishes?
10. If you could learn to cook one type of cuisine perfectly, which would you choose? Why that one?
11. Do you think home cooking is getting more popular or less popular in your country? How so?
12. Is cooking a creative activity or just following instructions? Why or why not?

Upper-Intermediate (B2)

1. What are some of the advantages of cooking your meals at home? How about the disadvantages?
2. Compare street food culture and restaurant culture in your country. What are the upsides of each?
3. What are the implications of the growing popularity of plant-based cooking for both health and the environment?
4. How has the internet changed the way people learn to cook? What are some popular examples?
5. Compare how cooking is portrayed in media today versus 20 years ago. What has changed?
6. How has globalization changed what ingredients are available and how people cook? What have we gained and lost?
7. How is cooking at home different now compared to how your grandparents cooked? What has changed the most?
8. How much food do you think gets wasted because of the way people cook and shop? What could be done to reduce it?
9. As fast food becomes more common around the world, do you think people are losing traditional cooking skills? What do you think about those changes?
10. How does cooking vary from region to region within your country? What explains those differences?

Advanced (C1)

1. How does the way a society treats its professional cooks and kitchen workers reveal its deeper values about labor, class, and who deserves respect?
2. What tensions exist between preserving authentic traditional recipes and adapting them for modern health concerns, convenience, and global tastes?
3. How do immigration and cultural exchange transform a country’s food identity, and at what point does borrowing from another culture’s cooking become problematic?
4. How might advances in artificial intelligence and automation in the kitchen change the meaning and purpose of cooking for future generations?
5. How do cooking and eating rituals both preserve and challenge social hierarchies within families and communities?
6. To what extent does the industrialization of food production simultaneously liberate and alienate people from the act of cooking?
7. In what ways has the commercialization of home cooking through social media, cookbooks, and TV shows both empowered and pressured home cooks?
8. What does the rise of ‘food as entertainment’ reveal about contemporary relationships between consumption, identity, and authenticity?
9. Why have humans across every culture and throughout history turned the basic need to eat into such an elaborate social and artistic practice?
10. How do cultural attitudes toward gender roles, family traditions, and economic pressures shape who does the cooking in different societies?

PDF: Download a PDF of all the questions