follow-up on "eating better": cooking and time

Amanda Marcotte at pandagon has a critique of Michael Pollan's latest NYT Magazine article, which is in turn a reflection on the new Julie & Julia movie, based on a book. Marcotte's critique is from a feminist perspective (namely, that Pollan seems to be guilt-tripping women who don't cook more, while letting men off the hook for it. But in follow-up to my weekend post on how Americans simply have less time to cook, here's a double quote from Pollan and Marcotte, respectively:

If cooking really offers all these satisfactions, then why don’t we do more of it? Well, ask Julie Powell: for most of us it doesn’t pay the rent, and very often our work doesn’t leave us the time; during the year of Julia, dinner at the Powell apartment seldom arrived at the table before 10 p.m. For many years now, Americans have been putting in longer hours at work and enjoying less time at home. Since 1967, we’ve added 167 hours — the equivalent of a month’s full-time labor — to the total amount of time we spend at work each year, and in households where both parents work, the figure is more like 400 hours. Americans today spend more time working than people in any other industrialized nation — an extra two weeks or more a year. Not surprisingly, in those countries where people still take cooking seriously, they also have more time to devote to it.

And that doesn’t take the daily commute into the equation. I blame the daily commute more than any other factor for why Americans will watch cooking shows, but won’t actually get up and cook very much. Americans spend an hour and a half a day driving. They drive 16 miles on average to and from work. Those are miles driven, for most commuters, in thick, snarled, energy-draining traffic. The last thing Americans want to do when they get home, after that, is cook. Most of them think of cooking as something you do starting with a recipe, which inevitably means that you don’t have all the ingredients, and that means adding more driving time going to the grocery store even more, and who wants that? Pollan wants to put about 90% of the blame on the nationwide embrace of food in freezers and cans and boxes or out of drive-thrus---which is why he’s interested in the fact that even housewives eat about the same as everyone else---but I’m not so sure. I think a culture of processed food took advantage of people’s limited mental space for cooking, and became the norm.

Very good points, all. Pollan's seem to reflect my earlier notes regarding the need to reform how we think about work in order to improve our eating habits, but I will amend my list and add Marcotte's comments regarding our need to reform how we get to and from work. While we might not being to change travel time or distance for everyone, certainly public transportation can be much less stressful than commuting by car, trading traffic for the ability to catch up on your reading.