Sarah Kliff interviews Sarah Bowen, one of the researchers behind the home-cooking study we covered earlier this month:
SK: Was there anything in doing this research that surprised you?
SB: How much people were cooking. We hear all of the time that Americans have stopped cooking. A lot of the families in our study were cooking every night, especially the poorest families. They couldn’t afford to eat fast food and a lot didn’t have cars. People were cooking a lot and that surprised me a little, because of how much we hear that the opposite is true.
At the same time, they felt they weren’t cooking well enough. They felt like they didn’t have enough money and weren’t able to cook the right way or the way they should be.
Linda Tirado offers some more perspective in an interview we cited earlier:
[W]hen you’re wealthy you can go buy things when they’re in bulk. Because it’s the question of startup capital, really: if you can spend your money up front in the right places wisely, then you’ll save money in the long term. But if you’re constantly struggling just to kind of patch it up and make ends meet, you’re taking whatever the most convenient option is, which is inherently going to be more expensive.
For more reactions to the study, see this “Room For Debate”.
The Dish 