doing a biology project and they want us to figure out how long it takes to cook 6 different foods at 5 different temperatures and gather 30 separate data points. They want us to identify an x(independent) and a y(dependent) variable that can be recorded on a table. Would x be the temperature and y the food item?

There are two independent variables — foods and temperature, with whatever criterion you want to indicate the cooking results as the dependent variable.