Not Enough Time to Cook

There has been the expectation that as income falls, the amount of time a family spends cooking will climb--in part to economize but also because less time employed outside the home leaves individuals more time to cook. However, contrary to patterns seen in the past, it now appears that low-income U.S. families spend very little time preparing meals.

Indeed, a study issued this week reports that low-income families don't allocate nearly as much time to food preparation as would be necessary to implement the Thrifty Food Plan, an Agriculture Department program which shows Food Stamp recipients how to prepare nutritious meals using low-cost foods available under the Food Stamp program.

Preparing meals from scratch that comply with recommendations of the Thrifty Food Plan take an estimated 80 to 130 minutes, on average, per day. In fact, the new study finds, low-income families where all adults work full-time typically reserve only 40 minutes per day for meal preparation.

Studies by the boatload have shown that people tend to down healthier fare when they eat at home. Moreover, meals cooked from scratch tend to have more nutrients, fewer preservatives, less salt, less sugar, and less fat than foods that have been commercially processed.

In their new report, "Who Has Time to Cook?", Lisa Mancino and Constance Newman of the Agriculture Department's Economic Research Service sifted through data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau on how individuals use their time throughout the day. For this analysis, they focused, of course, on time spent cooking.

As might be expected, women who don't work outside the home--people who in the past might have been termed housewives--spent the most time in the kitchen. On average, they devoted slightly more than 70 minutes a day preparing meals. Women who worked part-time outside the home averaged about 55 minutes a day fixing meals, and full-time working women spent a mere 38 to 46 minutes a day cooking.

Single women found less incentive to cook. On average, those that worked spent 15 fewer minutes per day cooking than those who were married or lived with partners. Perhaps surprisingly, single non-working women spent a half-hour less cooking food per day than those who were married or otherwise partnered.

What about men? Fuhgeddaboudit, as my New York relatives would say. Regardless of income level, those with full- or part-time jobs spent 13 to 17 minutes a day cooking; those who were unemployed spent a mere half-hour or less, on average.

The bottom line, Mancino and Newman say, is that the Thrifty Food Plan doesn't account for how little time people now find available for meal preparation. To offer useful guidance, this Plan will need significant a retooling, they argue, finding recipes for alternatives that can be whipped up in far less time.

As a woman who typically spends 11 to 14 hours outside the home at work and in commuting, I can attest that even when the larder is well-stocked, I have little enthusiasm for spending an hour or more preparing dinner. Except on weekends, even breakfast is prepared on the fly.

Indeed, I'm convinced that too little time and motivation to cook has become one major fallout of our overextended workforce. A correllary, those of us who don't have the energy to cook are also unlikely to possess the energy to exercise in what little free time they can find.

It's not even that we're all doing this just to chase the almight buck. Many jobs require long hours--and exist great distances from where the workforce is likely to live. When will society decide to value quality of life? Once we're all fat and sick? Oops...we're already there, aren't we?