In the US, girls learned how to cook, starting with Easy-Bake™ Ovens. Boys learning to cook? Sissy stuff. Boys learned to heat up pizza rolls and play CoD.
I credit this with why I know how to cook as well as I do. We grew up poor by most standards in the US, but my uncle was a butcher, both grandparents were farmers, so the one thing we had access to was fruits, vegetables and good meats.
Its also why I think i never learned good portion control as a child and still have trouble maintaining a healthy weight (among other reasons I won't get into here), we made very good savory food all the time because its what we had. We had to cook, as take out wasn't an option, and frozen foods weren't cost effective the same way for us (due to familial professions, we had access to things most people don't in this way).
That's the irony. I feel like I grew up with blander foods I'd be less inclined to eat them so much growing up, feeding a long habit of food being comfort.
So my mate would go round to his grandparents and find his grandad stirring a pot of chilli and a pot of stew and a pot of curry each roughly the size of a dustbin, and be greeted with "Oh hello, young lad, I wish I'd known you were coming, I'd have made you some dinner!"
I received similar pushback for taking both Home Ec classes. It was really the only way out of the latchkey kid diet, which, yes, was primarily sandwiches, Steak-Umms, and so on.
"But you'd be the only boy in the class, everyone else in the class is a girl!" was the general objection from the staff doing the timetables.
Yes. That is rather the point, isn't it?
Anyway I did Technical Drawing instead because either they couldn't see what the plan was, or they could see it all too well.
When I had to do some photography on appointment and sometimes videography, well, nervous people can mess up their clothes. A number of women were surprised when I whipped out a needle and matching thread to briefly repair a tear in their clothing when time was tight.
I felt pretty annoyed at having to defend these kinds of choices, and a surprising amount of the pushback came not from boys my own age, but girls and women.
Yeah, I overstated the reality for rhetorical effect, but it also would depend on what part of the US. Gender roles have changed in some places, but not so much in others.
> until I reached high school and football practice got in the way
That says a lot about US culture right there.