Try Cooking For Once

First Lady Michelle Obama has used her position in the White House to encourage America to eat healthier by growing a home garden. But what about cooking your own meals?

Growing your own fruits and veggies is great, and I commend Mrs. Obama for encouraging America to do so. But cooking your own meal is also crucial to eating healthy. And I don't mean heating some water and making instant soup. I mean making a meal entirely from scratch, where you cut your vegetables (which you picked up yourself) and choose your seasonings and use your pots and pans and stove and oven to create a meal that you were intimately involved in from start to finish and so can see what is or isn't healthy about it.

I was brought up in a household where I was expected to cook entire meals, both for myself and my family, since I was in 9th grade. I started simple, with spagghetti and sauce, and worked my way up to stir-fry with a dozen different vegetables and seasonings. As a result, I feel deprived when I have to go long periods of time without cooking, and I don't like not knowing what's in my meal.

Unfortunately, it seems like I may be in the minority with this exerience. According to a New York Times Op-Ed article, "research by the NPD Group showed that Americans ate takeout meals an average of 125 times a year in 2008, up from 72 a year in 1983. And a recent U.C.L.A. study of 32 working families found that the subjects viewed cooking from scratch as a kind of rarefied hobby...[and] according to a 2008 NPD study, of all supper entrees “cooked” at home, just 58 percent were prepared with raw ingredients".

These statistics are appalling. Cooking is a hobby now? Not for me or my family, it isn't. Besides being healthy, cooking is a way to spend quality time with family, chatting is a neutral zone while working together to create a delicious and healthy meal for yourself. Some of my fondest memories are of me and my parents and siblings working together to create a dinner, listening to Garrison Keillor's A Prarie Home Companion. Laughing together, talking about the day, making plans together for the week: that's what cooking means to me.

So come on Mrs. Obama. You've got the bully pulpit here - and the press already loves you and yours - so use this opportunity and show people how to love to cook. And since "cooking isn't one of [your] huge things", maybe you could work with your White House Chefs (who must love to cook) to show the American People how to make simple, healthy meals.

Maybe this metaphor is more appropriate for your basketball-playing husband, but the ball's in your court now.