Americans don’t like to cook. They don’t want to spend the time
it takes for food shopping, food preparation and clean up,
especially when it’s so much easier to stop for a quick bite at
a restaurant or drive-thru or bring home some take-out. Yet,
experts are convinced that making home cooking fashionable again
would be one of the most effective steps we could take to
address the nation’s obesity crisis. The United States ranks at
the bottom of industrialized countries not only in terms of time
spent on meal preparation but also on consumption, according to
surveys conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD), an international group that analyzes
economic data worldwide. In other words, we not only don’t cook,
we also don’t set much time aside to enjoy our food. Instead,
more and more of us skip breakfast, work through lunch and
sustain ourselves throughout the day by snacking. The percentage
of calories from snacks in the American diet has doubled since
the 1970s, as more peo