Is home cooking on the irrevocable decline?

[Daniel Rogov]

It is currently estimated that by the year 2010, two out of every three meals will be eaten out of the home. That most surely converts into the reality that people are cooking fewer meals at home. That does not, however, fit the hypothesis that people are eating less well or that cooking at home has lost or is about to lose its popularity.

What it may fit is the increasing amount of data that demonstrates that people (in the Western world) are becoming fed up with "cooking" pre-frozen things that are called "dinners", that second-rate tinned and jarred produce are no longer the rage that they once were with many people. It also fits the hypothesis that an increasing number of people, although cooking less frequently, are now cooking far better - many devoting time to experimenting at home with various ethnic or even haute-cuisines, even more experimenting with foodstuffs that are new to them.

What is happening in kitchens around the Western World may have something distinctly akin to what is happening in the world of wine - that is to say that as people (especially in western Europe) are drinking less but insisting on better wines when they do drink; they are preparing fewer meals in the home but those that they are preparing are more adventurous and more tempting than those that had been prepared previously. And let us also keep in mind that in at least some socio-economic circles there is a clear movement back to the preparation of "real food" in the home - real in the sense of genuinely national, regional or ethnic as opposed to popping frozen or chill-cooled pre-prepared Thai, Chinese, Italian or Greek meals into the microwave.

My prediction (and I'll be glad to respond to counter predictions in 6 more years) - by the year 2010 two out of three meals will indeed be eaten away from the home but those meals prepared in the home will be prepared increasingly by men and women who really give a damn about what they put on their tables. ....and who gain genuine pleasure from creating dishes and meals that they and their cohorts truly enjoy.

Edited October 9, 2004 by Daniel Rogov (log)

[tejon]

Shit. Now I feel like a dinosaur. I change my own oil in my vehicle (as well as other routine maintenance), have just made a desk, cook all of my food from scratch (providing that produce is in season, otherwise I commit adultery with canned or frozen), every bed has a hand-made quilt on it, and we wear hand-knit sweathers.

Another dinosaur here. I stay home with my boys, Mr. tejon works outside the home. This was a difficult financial choice, as supporting a family of four on that income is a stretch. But it was important to both of us that one of us be home when the children were small, that someone be able to make a home for all of us. So that is my job, unpaid as it is. Food really is the center to our home - eating dinner together each night, making popcorn to munch on the couch while watching a movie, special snacks for the boys. We make free time to cook together, to share meals together. What better way to come together as a family?

[Carrot Top]

Shall we start the Dinosaur Club? I stay home to raise my children, too. Just me, one parent.

Would not trade it for all the tea in China.

Imagine, a gathering of Dinosaurs. We might actually manage to look impressive to onlookers....all standing together.

Nothing like a group of determined mothers to make for a fearsome sight, huh?

[Busboy]

It is currently estimated that by the year 2010, two out of every three meals will be eaten out of the home.  That most surely converts into the reality that people are cooking fewer meals at home. That does not, however, fit the hypothesis that people are eating less well or that cooking at home has lost or is about to lose its popularity.

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Umm. That statistic absolutely does fit the hypothesis that cooking at home is about to lose its popularity.

[tejon]

Shall we start the Dinosaur Club? I stay home to raise my children, too. Just me, one parent.

Would not trade it for all the tea in China.

Imagine, a gathering of Dinosaurs. We might actually manage to look impressive to onlookers....all standing together.

Nothing like a group of determined mothers to make for a fearsome sight, huh? 

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Imagine the curious onlookers. "They actually bake bread? From scratch?"

[jgarner53]

Imagine the curious onlookers. "They actually bake bread? From scratch?"

I already get that. The incredulous "you made this?!" as though it were outside the realm of possibility, impossible for a home cook, or simply so onerous a task that the person cannot conceive of someone voluntarily doing it.

I think the statistic that 2 out of 3 meals will be eaten out of the home by 2010 is erroneous, unless you consider kids eating lunch at school, or adults carrying leftovers to the office/job, as well as people grabbing the granola bar in the morning as they run out the door. Perhaps in large urban areas, this might prove true, but I think that there are enough people like snowangel and tejon who are defying the statistics.

For my own part, on days that I work, I'm all but forced to eat out, as the office where I work has no break room, and the lone microwave is in the boss' office (as is his small, dorm-sized fridge). I do not feel comfortable enough to ask to invade his space and use his microwave, and as I don't care for the basic sandwich, I eat out. My preference would be to bring in leftovers. As for breakfast, it's always at home, and dinner is there as well (homemade, not takeout or frozen), at least 4 nights a week.

All this in spite of my suboptimal kitchen, with its substandard lighting such that I throw a shadow onto whatever I'm cutting/washing/cooking. My kitchen might not be as small as some (it's about 120 square feet), but that doesn't mean it's a joy to cook in either. However, I decided at some point that having an inefficient kitchen is hardly an excuse not to cook, and I can turn out some pretty spectacular food in spite of its failings.

[leviathan]

Looking at the economics of it all, I can't say I blame most people. With wages rising and food costs falling, it seems more and more rational to outsource your cooking needs. Indeed, if we take a place like Manhattan, an apartment might easily top $1,000,000. Assuming 10% of the space is taken up by the kitchen and that's $100,000 just for kitchen real-estate. Figure 5% rate of return on investment per annum and that means your using $5000 per year just to maintain a kitchen or a bit less than $15 a day. Figure an hour to prepare a meal per day at maybe $20/hr and its now up to $35 a day, add $10 for ingredients and it's $45 a day. Now for $45 a day, there are usually a lot better options that home cooking unless you specifically enjoy that terype of thing which it seems most people do not. Economically, it would be more rational to ditch the kitchen and eat out every night for a single yuppie living in manhattan.

If anything, people's wages have stagnated.

And, the cost of a kitchen is more of a sunk cost. You're going have to pay for it anyway as all houses come with kitchen. When it comes to resale value, the most valuable rooms are the bathrooms and the kitchen.

To have better argued your point, it would have been better to drop the point about $15 a day for kitchens, and focused more on oppurtunity costs- the time it took to learn how to cook and the time it takes to cook a meal.

I tend to think we've seen a signifigant decrease in home cooking because women are given more options that their mothers were and as women have entered the workforce, there's less time to cook.

[ghostrider]

I feel like there's a lot of economic, class & cultural analysis that could be done on this topic, and much of it is beyond me. (I could do some research on line but I'd rather shop & cook. )

Is home cooking on the decline? I don't know. I see the shopping carts filled with frozen pizzas at the supermarkets & I know that's not the kind of home cooking I knew as a child. But it's still home cooking.

I also know the crowds I see at the produce markets in my area of Jersey (Rt. 17 Farmers Market and Corrado's, for anyone familiar with the territory), and they tell me that there's a lot of old-fashioned home cooking still being done.

Many in these crowds clearly have English as a second language. Maybe the closer you are to being an immigrant, the more prone you are to doing things the traditional way. That will support a certain infrastructure of food distribution & likely keep home cooking alive & well.

[annecros]

Out of curiosity, I google it up real quick, and according to Pew Research enjoyment of cooking is stable, but there has been a gender shift:

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/?PubID=309

From the site:

"While enjoyment of eating has dropped since 1989, enjoyment of cooking has held steady. About a third of the public (34%) say they enjoy cooking "a great deal" and another quarter (26%) say they enjoy cooking "a fair amount."

These figures are essentially unchanged since 1989, but there has been a notable shift in their gender composition. Today about the same percentage of women (35%) and men (32%) say they enjoy cooking a great deal; in 1989, women (39%) were more likely than men (25%) to say this. Also, more blacks (40%) than whites (33%) enjoy cooking a great deal.

People who enjoy cooking a great deal are less likely to eat out regularly than are those who don't enjoy cooking as much. But about 13% of Americans say all of the following: they eat at restaurants at least weekly; they enjoy cooking "a great deal"; and they enjoy eating "a great deal." More men than women and more younger adults (ages 18-49) than older adults (ages 50 and older) are in this gourmand grouping."

[Pontormo]

While Shalmanese provided a link to this important thread in his ongoing blog, I am bumping it up to make it easier to read in full. I am sure I am not the only one who joined The EGullet Society after the thread's heyday and I hope other more recent members have thoughts to contribute.

Edited June 27, 2007 by Pontormo (log)

[barolo]

It seems to me that the overwhelming trend in rich, 1st world societies is tending towards going to eat out more and more at the expense of home cooking with from scratch ingredients. Is a person who cooks at home with raw ingredients in 50 years time going to be viewed as someone who builds their own furniture or performs their own car maintenence is viewed today? It seems skills like these have virtually disappeared from the average person's life unless they specifically choose to make a career out of it due to a variaty of factors.

Looking at the economics of it all, I can't say I blame most people. With wages rising and food costs falling, it seems more and more rational to outsource your cooking needs.

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Well John Thorne agrees with you, Shalmanese, in his most recent book, Mouth Wide Open:

Even though cooking is an integral part of my life, I’ve never felt that it ought to be treated as a defining characteristic of a happy home.  In fact, I won’t be in the least surprised if the in the next decade the rising prices of gas and electricity and the ever-appreciating value of free time will see preparing the family meal go the same way as sewing its clothing or hammering together its furniture.  Certainly there’s nothing creepier than those obviously unused showcase kitchens in upscale houses that have all the marble – and all the warmth – of a mausoleum.

[Chris Amirault]

Well John Thorne agrees with you, Shalmanese, in his most recent book, Mouth Wide Open:

Even though cooking is an integral part of my life, I’ve never felt that it ought to be treated as a defining characteristic of a happy home.  In fact, I won’t be in the least surprised if the in the next decade the rising prices of gas and electricity and the ever-appreciating value of free time will see preparing the family meal go the same way as sewing its clothing or hammering together its furniture.  Certainly there’s nothing creepier than those obviously unused showcase kitchens in upscale houses that have all the marble – and all the warmth – of a mausoleum.

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Weird quotation from Thorne, whom I usually admire. Sewing and carpentry are, with few exceptions, solitary events, and I'd venture to guess that preparing the family meal is much less so in most of the homes where cooks still cook. In addition, the rise of "mausoleum" kitchens is connected not to the death of the family meal but to the rise of kitchen design and appliances as status symbols. It's not as if $75,000 McMansion kitchens prevent people from making dinner. Creepy, sure, but portending the erasure of food preparation? I doubt it.

[CKatCook]

I have not read the whole thread...although I should before I respond. So I apologize if this seems out of place..

my 1 1/2 cent:

You make time for what is a priority. Period. For much of human evolution man has had to spend a good deal of time hunting, gathering, preparing food. In terms of history, it's only recently we have begun to outsource alot of this.

I sit in about the 50 thou a year range. I work full time, I go to school part time. Same for my hubby. No kids. We cook from scratch at home almost all the time, maybe eat out once a week. I think its a shame that I have people asking me who has schedules not as demanding as mine where I find time to bake my own bread, home make pasta. It's a joy for me to cook. My hubby is the same way, we share the cooking. I cannot imagine when I have friends that tell me they eat out 5-6 times a week, I don't know how they do it.

Maybe its short sided on my part, but I almost feel bad for people that don't have the time to cook.....

[MomOfLittleFoodies]

Food costs are dropping?

That's news to me, as I'm watching prices rise at my local grocery store.

I'm not always cooking out of boxes and bags, but I'm not cooking entirely from scratch either. Depends on how hectic things get (with 4 kids it does, trust me) and how tired I am come time to make dinner.

I don't have the luxury of eating out frequently, and I can't use a lot of convenience foods due to food allergies, so not only am I cooking at home a lot, I'm having to be creative as far as technique goes.

I enjoy cooking from scratch, and hope to do more of it. Eating out gets kind of stressful for me.

Edited January 13, 2008 by MomOfLittleFoodies (log)

[saucée]

This is a very interesting thread. I am always surprised to hear how often people eat out. I'm not exactly sure what kind of a trend there is regarding this but I really don't think there will be very many kitchenless homes in the near future.

Using Manhattan as an example doesn't work because it is so unique. New York has little in common with almost the entirety of the US in terms of the number of options for eating at restaurants, for instance. If the choice is to see what you can make out of what you have or drive say 5-10 miles for food that is badly prepared and makes you feel like you've got a rock in your stomach, what is the cost benefit analysis for that? As for cost benefit analysis and it's application to this issue, I don't think it's really a very valuable way of thinking about this problem. Fortunately, many things in the lives of humans are not quantifiable in dollars. When I learned about CBA in an economics class, my professor gave a few examples. I remember one distinctly in which he discussed the value in terms of dollars of reading a "story-book." The fact that he referred to literature as a "story-book" revealed that his perspective on such things was perhaps a bit limited, but the notion of attaching a dollar value to an hour of "story-book reading" was and is absurd to me. What is the value in terms of dollars of a piece of art (literature, music, food) that completely changes your perspective on life? There are things that are not quantifiable in dollars, such as the way a certain piece of music makes me feel or the excitement I get from making a meal that I think people will really enjoy and sharing it with them.

Cooking is not like woodworking or sewing. People need to eat everyday and eating is perhaps one of the most dramatic interfaces humans have with the world and one another. When I have people over to my house and share food that I made completely from scratch, there is something else going on besides merely satiating ourselves for a reasonable price. I think making food is important to people and they will continue to do it because there's more than money that factors into this fundamental social act.