A recent story on MSNBC referenced Janet Flammang’s The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society and Michael Pollan’s review of the book in NYRB.

“Working women are too busy to cook, but fathers don’t view planning and preparing the family meal as valuable as other duties, so they don’t focus on their sauté skills. The amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in the labor force or income, Harvard researchers have found. But someone needs to be preparing the meals and we can’t just expect mom to do it. Dads and children need to join them there.”