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Should we be surprised by the University of Minnesota's findings? Heathier eating begins by cooking at home. I thought the article title was as good as any sentence I could muster.
People who cook at home are more likely to meet the daily requirements for calcium, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and fat. I'm going to guess the folks that eat most of their meals out of a greasy paper sack in their car meet the fat requirement as well. There's no mention of good fats versus bad fats in this research. So here's something on the good vs. bad.
Now most home cooked meals I've had don't usually include fruit, so it looks like shopping for those meals, encourages a little extra lingering in the produce aisle. And what's an easier, healthier snack than a piece of fruit? A banana peel is much easier to remove than a candy bar wrapper, and it doesn't melt in your hands.
In addition to home chefs being healthier by cooking for themselves, it has always been believed that eating at home is cheaper than eating out. This theory was questioned at the Get Rich Slowly blog recently, but by the end of the post the original hypothesis was seemingly upheld.
One argument presented was the time factor. But do we really save time when we eat at a restaurant? Any parent knows that corraling the kids to get them out the door can be a lengthy process. Travel time, waiting for tables, diaper changes in restaurant restrooms, kids' menu negotiations, confining the children to a table area smaller than that of a factory-farmed calf, armed with little more than 4 crayons and an activity placemat as the last defense against the inevitable, "I'm hungry, where's my food?", all these things make cooking at home sound like a better option for the family.
Rachael Ray must have been singled out as one of Time's most influential people of 2006 for something. 30 minute meals don't sound too inconvenient to me. Your kids are in their own environment with their own toys, and are too busy playing to bother you about dinner, making meal preparation a little more blissful. (Well, the kids will come up with something to bother you with while you're cooking, but at least they'll have the square footage of your house for play, and no adjoining booths in sight to disturb.)
Are people cooking more? I can only say, maybe. Are healthy people cooking more? To that I would say, "Yes".
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