The authentic cooking class is a performance, not a lesson

Here's the thing. The cooking class has a format now. You pay €80. Someone takes you to a market. The market visit has been pre-arranged with the same three vendors for six years — they know the tour, they know the script, they know when to hand you a sprig of something and explain it slowly. Then you go to a kitchen. You make a dish you could have googled in four minutes. You eat it. You feel like you learned something.

The specific crime is the word authentic. Authentic means it happened naturally. It means the person teaching you cooks this way because it's how they cook, not because they have a TripAdvisor page and a cancellation policy. The moment someone has a TripAdvisor rating for their grandmother's recipe, that recipe is no longer doing what you think it's doing. It's doing a job. The job is making you feel like you had an experience.

I'm not against learning to cook. I've watched a woman named Fatima make bastilla in her actual kitchen in Fès and I would have paid anything for that — except she didn't charge anything, because I was a guest, not a customer. The actual lesson is free. It's called ordering lunch, sitting down, and asking what's in it.