Ever since Lean In came out, we’ve been rehashing the debate about women’s roles in the house and home. While many women are re-energized to stand up for themselves at work and push ahead with their careers, others of us find we long for the opposite. I’m not the first to have this issue on my mind; take a look at these pieces in The Atlantic and New York Magazine. Now in my thirties, I’m far less driven than I was 10 years ago to be a go-getter with my career, partly because I’m just freaking tired and partly because I’ve found the value and joy of staying home and cooking a meal from scratch. Especially as someone who has done her level best to shop from the farmer’s market and give up processed food, I find that more and more I am in the kitchen. Sometimes modernization is really throwing things back to a time when we did things better.

Please understand that like any respectable, modern, and educated woman, I believe women should have equal pay and opportunity in the work force. I refer more to getting away from our country’s dependence on highly processed foods. What do these two things have in common, you ask? Well, the reality is that cooking from scratch is far healthier then eating things from a box, and when mothers were home cooking every day (and I do mean cooking, not throwing pasta in boiling water), kids were thinner, and the rates of obesity and heart disease were lower. We know for a fact that our poor eating habits are responsible for the poor health of the nation, maybe not exclusively, but certainly in large part. Eating badly is the number one thing we do as a nation to kill ourselves. Continue reading »