Cooking is the closest thing we've got to a silver bullet solution to countless health problems. Shrugging it off as "elitist" is foolish, since home-prepped meals are only as complicated as you want to make them.
A few weeks back, I wrote about a new study that assessed the state of home cooking in America. The researchers pointed out that there are a lot of assumptions surrounding what a home-cooked meal should look like, and that many families fall short of those expectations for a variety of reasons – lack of money, lack of transportation to and from grocery stores, picky eaters, insufficient utensils and/or furniture, busy schedules, etc.
While I don’t deny that the researchers reveal an important side to the home-cooking debate that is raging in North America right now, fueled by passionately idealistic food writers and locavores on one side and pushed back by low-income families, Big Ag, and the processed food industry on the other side, the basic argument that “home cooking isn’t for everyone” just doesn’t sit well with me.
Home cooking must find a way to work, because within the current broken food system that we’ve got, it’s the most sensible, economical, and easiest way to provide people, particularly children, with optimal nourishment – which should be a basic human right. Feeding our kids cheap, flimsy burgers from McDonalds on white buns that never go bad is an unacceptable solution, even if it seems faster and cheaper than making supper at home.
Read more: http://www.treehugger.com/culture/we-cant-give-home-cooking.html
