Michael Pollan

So they associated fast food with freedom for women.

And this ended this conversation between men and women over who should cook or how to divide labor.

And we should have completed that conversation and re-divided labor in the house.

But instead, we just turned to this easy out, which was more prepared foods.

I've been arguing in favor of cooking for many reasons.

I think many things happen when you cook food at home.

For one thing, everybody eats the same thing.

Whereas when you're using processed foods very often, and I've seen this, it's marketed this way, that the young boy goes for the frozen pizza and the teenage girl has a salad or the mother has a salad and

Then there's a manhandler TV dinner for the dad.

And they want to divide and conquer us.

So they market very directly to different genders and different ages.

Whereas if you're cooking, everybody eats from the same platter.

And there's something psychologically beautiful about that, sharing food.

And I remember once going to a big food manufacturer, I think it was General Mills, and they hired these anthropologists to study the family meal.

And if you ask people, they'll still say, oh yeah, we have a family meal.

But they would actually have these volunteer families and they put cameras above their dining room table to see how they actually ate meals.

And the way it worked was the mother had a salad and sat there for an hour and different other members of the family came and went and would microwave their own meal and sit down with the mom for a little bit and then wander off.

They weren't there at the same time.

It made for an incredibly disjointed family meal, but people still said, yeah, we have family meal.

I see the industry as deliberately undermining family meal.