Intake Dept.
Magazine Preview - Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch - NYTimes.com
A 2003 study by a group of Harvard economists led by David Cutler found that the rise of food preparation outside the home could explain most of the increase in obesity in America. Mass production has driven down the cost of many foods, not only in terms of price but also in the amount of time required to obtain them. ... Cutler and his colleagues demonstrate that as the “time cost” of food preparation has fallen, calorie consumption has gone up ... They found that when we don’t have to cook meals, we eat more of them: as the amount of time Americans spend cooking has dropped by about half, the number of meals Americans eat in a day has climbed; since 1977, we’ve added approximately half a meal to our daily intake.
Sayonara, Mr. Fatty! hinted at many of the same things, too - and these are things I've suspected for a while but found difficult to articulate. We've made it surpassingly easy to overeat, to surround ourselves with calorically-dense but nutritionally-meager food, and to assume that such things can be substitutes for more time-established eating habits. (My mother has a rule about meals: you can eat as much as you like when you're at the table, but forget about snacks unless it's something like crudities.)
Among the other things Vertical sent me recently - and which I didn't review if only because I didn't feel I was competent to speak about them at the time - were a series of cookbooks by celebrity chef Kentaro Kobayashi. He emphasizes ease of preparation, but even an "easy" self-prepared meal is still that much more work than something you pull out of the freezer and stick in the microwave. And probably better for you on all counts.
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