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"When I was in college, living two states away from my family, I studied the map and found a different route home from the one I usually traveled. The next weekend, I drove back to Kentucky the new way, which did turn out to be faster. During my visit, I made sure all my relatives heard about the navigational brilliance that saved me 37 minutes. &amp;quot;Thirty-seven,&amp;quot; my grandfather mused. &amp;quot;And here you just used up 15 of them telling all about it. What&amp;#039;s your plan for the other 22?&amp;quot;  Good question. I&amp;#039;m still stumped for an answer whenever the religion of time-saving pushes me to zip through a meal or a chore, rushing everybody out the door to the next point on a schedule. All that hurry can blur the truth that every minute I save will get used on something else, possibly no more sublime than staring at the wall trying to remember what I just ran upstairs for.  I have no argument with convenience. I&amp;#039;m inordinately fond of my dishwasher, and I like the shiny tools that lie in my kitchen drawers. After 19 years as a working mother, I know the art of the quickie supper following a long day, and sometimes if my husband and I are too weary, we&amp;#039;ll go out to a restaurant, mainly to keep the kitchen clean.  But if I were to define my style of feeding my family, on a permanent basis, by the dictum &amp;quot;Get it over with, quick,&amp;quot; something cherished in our family life would collapse. I&amp;#039;m talking about dinnertime, the cornerstone of our family&amp;#039;s mental health. I&amp;#039;d say 75 percent of my crucial parenting effort has taken place during or surrounding the time our family convenes for our evening meal. I&amp;#039;m sure I&amp;#039;m not the only parent to think so. A survey of National Merit scholars \u2014 exceptionally successful 18-year-olds crossing all lines of ethnicity, gender, geography, and class \u2014 turned up a common thread in their lives: the habit of sitting down at the family dinner table together. It&amp;#039;s not just the food making them brilliant. It&amp;#039;s probably the parents \u2014 their care, priorities, support. The words &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll expect you home for dinner.&amp;quot; I understand that cooking at the end of a long day is a burden we could live without. Moms and dads are running on overdrive, smashing the caretaking duties into small spaces between job and carpool and bedtime. Eating preprocessed or fast food can look like salvation in the short run, until we start losing what real mealtimes give to a family: civility, economy, and health.  A lot of us are wishing for a way back home, to the place where care-and-feeding isn&amp;#039;t zookeeper&amp;#039;s duty but something happier and more inspiring. Approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, may fulfill that wish. Required participation from spouse and kids is an element of the equation; an obsession with spotless collars, ironing, and kitchen floors you can eat off of \u2014 not so much. We&amp;#039;ve earned the right to forget about stupefying household busywork. But kitchens where food is cooked and eaten, those were really a good idea. It&amp;#039;s easy for any of us to claim no time for cooking; harder to look at what we&amp;#039;re doing instead, and why it&amp;#039;s thought of as more worthy. Some people really do work double shifts and pursue no recreational activities, ever. Or they are homeless or otherwise without access to a stove and refrigerator. But most of us are lucky enough to do some things for fun, or for self-improvement or family entertainment. Cooking can be one of those things.  Working people&amp;#039;s cooking, of course, will develop an efficiency ethic. I&amp;#039;m shameless about throwing out the extraneous plot twists of a hoity-toity recipe and getting to its main theme. Or ignoring cookbooks altogether during the week, relying mostly on simple meals I&amp;#039;ve made a thousand times before in endless variation: frittata, stir-fry, pasta with one protein and two vegetables thrown in. Or soups that can simmer unattended all day in our Crock-Pot, which is named Mrs. Cleaver.  More labor-intensive recipes we save for weekends: lasagna, quiches, roasted chicken, desserts of any kind. I have another rule about complicated dishes: Always double the recipe, so we can recoup the investment and eat this lovely thing again later in the week.  Routines save time, and tempers. Like a mother managing a toddler&amp;#039;s mood swings, our family has built some reliable backstops for those times in our week when work-weary, low-blood-sugar blowouts are most likely. Friday nights are always pizza-movie nights. Friends or dates are welcome; we rent one PG feature and one for after small children go to bed. We always keep the basic ingredients for pizza on hand \u2014 flour and yeast for the dough, mozzarella, and tomatoes (fresh, dried, or canned sauce, depending on the season). All other toppings vary with the garden and personal tastes. Picky children get to control the toppings on their own austere quadrant, while the adventurous may stake out another, piling on anything from smoked eggplant to caramelized onions, fresh herbs, and spinach.  Because it&amp;#039;s a routine, our pizzas come together without any fuss as we gather in the kitchen to decompress, have a glass of wine if we are of age, and talk about everybody&amp;#039;s week. I never have to think about what&amp;#039;s for dinner on Fridays.  Takeout is not the only easy way out. With a basic repertoire of unfussy recipes in your head, the better part of valor may be just turning on the burner and giving it a shot. I also have a crafty trick of inviting over friends whose cooking I admire, offering whatever ingredients they need, and myself as sous-chef. For a dedicated non-cook, the first step is likely the hardest: convincing oneself it&amp;#039;s worth the trouble in terms of health and household economy, let alone saving the junked-up world.  It really is. Cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad. The gains are quantifiable: Cooking and eating at home, even with quality ingredients, costs pennies on the dollar compared with meals prepared by a restaurant or factory. Shoppers who are daunted by the high price of organics may be looking at bar codes on boutique-organic prepared foods, not actual vegetables. A quality diet is not an elitist option for the do-it-yourselfer. Home-cooked, whole-ingredient cuisine will save money. It will also help trim and keep off extra pounds when that&amp;#039;s an issue \u2014 which it is for some two-thirds of American adults. Obesity is our most serious health problem, and our sneakiest, because so many calories slip in uncounted. Corn syrup and added fats have been outed as major ingredients in fast food, but they hide in packaged foods, too, even presumed-innocent ones like crackers. Cooking at home lets you guard the door, controlling not only what goes into your food but what stays out.  Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they&amp;#039;re missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven. The choreography of many people working in one kitchen is, by itself, a certain definition of family, after people have made their separate ways home to be together. Kitchen-based family gatherings are cooperative, and, in the best of worlds, nourishing and soulful. When everyone pitches in, calories get used up before anyone sits down to consume. But more significantly, a lot of talk happens first, news exchanged, secrets revealed across generations, paths cleared with a touch on the arm. I have given and received some of my life&amp;#039;s most important hugs with those big oven-mitt pot holders on both hands.  Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It&amp;#039;s the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood. Cooking and eating with young children teaches them civility and practical skills they can use later on to save money and stay healthy, whatever may happen to the gas-fueled food industry in their lifetimes. Family time is at a premium for most of us, and legitimate competing interests can easily crowd out cooking. But if grabbing fast food is the only way to get the kids to their healthy fresh-air soccer practice on time, that&amp;#039;s an interesting call. Artery-clogging specials that save a few minutes now can cost years later on.  We have dealt to today&amp;#039;s kids the statistical hand of a shorter life expectancy than their parents, which would be us, the ones taking care of them. Our thrown-away food culture is the sole reason. As my grandfather would say, by taking the faster drive, what did we save?  Barbara Kingsolver&amp;#039;s books include The Bean Trees,The Poisonwood Bible, and most recently, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, from which this article is adapted. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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