live estimate

people cooking right now

182,564,998people

2.222% of humanity

modelled estimate · updated every second · nothing here is actually being counted

cooking since you opened this page

meals cooked every day

6,572,339,914

meals starting every second

76,069

by the numbers

meals cooked

76,069

meals per second

food cooked

tonnes per second

Are you cooking right now?

Nobody is counting the world. We can count you, though.

confirmed cooks today0 people

said not right now0 people

See what's happening in your country

We only use your location to work out your country. We don't store your address.

by country — right now

country	local time	awake	people
China	09:18	93%	29,069,423
India	06:48	25%	8,132,586
United States	20:18	85%	6,455,936
Indonesia	08:18	85%	5,396,957
Mexico	19:18	90%	2,638,938
Japan	10:18	96%	2,631,824
Philippines	09:18	93%	2,413,597
Brazil	22:18	50%	2,364,582
Bangladesh	07:18	60%	2,342,492
Vietnam	08:18	85%	1,919,083

How this works (the honest bit). This is our assumption rather than a measurement. Plenty of meals are bought, reheated, or eaten cold, and plenty of cooking is not for a meal at all, so we assume 0.8 cooked meals per person per day at about forty minutes each. That puts roughly 180 million people at a hob or a chopping board at any moment - fewer than are eating, which is the sensible relationship between the two sites. Cooking follows the local clock, so it peaks before mealtimes in each country. Every figure on this page is a model built from population data, each country's local clock and the assumptions above. It is an estimate, it moves every second, and at least one of them is certainly true.

Why does cooking change food?

Heat does something to food that nothing else in the kitchen does. It breaks it down at the molecular level, and most of it does not reverse.

Heat unfolds protein. Protein molecules are folded into precise shapes. Heat shakes the bonds apart, so they unfold and tangle with each other. That is why an egg goes from clear and runny to white and solid, and why it never goes back.
Starch takes on water. Starch sits in tight crystalline granules. Warm them in water and they swell, absorb, and eventually burst, releasing starch into the liquid. That is what thickens a sauce and what makes a potato edible rather than gritty.
Sugar and protein brown together. Above roughly 140 degrees, amino acids and sugars react on the surface to produce hundreds of new flavour compounds. This is the Maillard reaction, and it is why browned food tastes of more than the sum of its parts.
Cell walls come apart. Pectin, the glue between plant cells, softens with heat. That is the difference between a raw carrot and a cooked one: the same cells, no longer locked together.

Cooking also destroys some vitamins and improves the availability of others, so it is not a straightforward upgrade. What it reliably does is make calories easier to extract, which is why a raw diet is hard to sustain without losing weight.

Standard food science. Protein denaturation, starch gelatinisation, Maillard browning and pectin softening are all textbook mechanisms.