FOOD FOR THOUGHT.." the importance of cooking at home".

 -The Cooking Paradox is the fact that people are cooking less and less yet watching other people cook more. The average man/woman spends only 27 minutes cooking [per day] today, half as much time as in the mid '60s, which means there are millions of people now spending more time watching other people cook on TV than they cook themselves. I don't need to point out that the food you watch getting cooked on TV is not food you get to eat! So what's the appeal? I argue there are deeply felt things we miss about cooking, about hanging around the kitchen watching our moms prepare dinner, perform all those amazing and aromatic alchemies—that cooking goes very deep, and we're not prepared to see it disappear from our lives entirely. But TV is a poor substitute for the real thing, in the same way that pornography is.
-Cooking is an agricultural act. Even more so than eating, because the cook knows a lot more about his or her ingredients—where they came from, how they were prepared—and can more easily vote to support one food chain, or another. Read labels, pay more for better ingredients (then eat a little less to make up for it), support farmers doing good work—these are all ways of "voting with our forks," which is surprisingly powerful. But we also need to vote with our votes for better agricultural policies—and specifically for a farm bill devoted not to overproduction of junk calories, as it is now, but to explicitly supporting the goals of health, both in the population and on the land.
-The industrialization of agriculture and, just as bad, the industrialization of eating—which is to say, eating alone and eating processed food. In time, people come to believe that food should be fast, cheap, and easy—rather than something beautiful, communal, deserving of our full attention, sometimes even sacred. From this error flows the collapse of the family meal—that great institution!—and with it the rise of obesity and chronic diseases. It's all connected.
-We need to learn to be in the kitchen, without feeling pulled this way and that. What happens in the kitchen can be viewed either as drudgery or the most wondrous alchemy—it's all in how you approach it. I used to hate chopping an onion, which to me is the great symbol of drudgery, not to mention literal irritation. When I began to actually enjoy dicing onions as a kind of meditation—and I don't pull this off every time, God knows—I knew I had passed over to another place in the kitchen, and really began to enjoy the work, as a respite from what I do for a living, as a way to get away from screens of every kind, as a way to re-engage my underemployed senses, all five of them. Cooking offers us so much, and I sincerely believe we are robbing ourselves of these satisfactions by outsourcing so much of this work to others—others who aren't very good at it and who we know don't have our best interests at heart.