What is the difference between cooking and making a sand mandala?

I’ve always liked sand mandalas as a concept, but could the monks’ time be better spent preparing food for the community? Cooking is also meditative creative process. It emphasizes impermanence, both of humans and of the food which will ultimately return to the earth. It aids in the lesson of detachment from personal ownership. And it the result is a thing of beauty.

A mandala feeds the community in a spiritual way, you might say, but food literally feeds it. So what am I missing here? Any monks in the audience with first-hand understanding?

Probably it’s just a tradition, but I say it’s time to learn a real lesson of impermanence by dropping dusty traditions in favor of modern pragmatism. Or perhaps it’s a matter of optics. Mandalas do have a simplicity to them that cooking lacks. Cooking requires a lot of resources. A group of traveling monks hauling a pile of All-Clad around might not be seen as masters of detachment from personal ownership.