Michael Pollan's cover story in the New York Times Magazine, "No One Cooks Here Anymore," is filled with equal parts sweet reminiscence of his mother 's experiments with recipes from Julia Child and discouraging statistics about the decline of cooking over the last thirty years.

Cooking dinner, it seems, has gone the way of the washboard. Reading the piece reminded me of a profile of Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown, who warned modern female readers to wait to be taken out to dinner 20 times before cooking for a man at home. The link between women's oppression and the kitchen is a powerful cultural idea, and it is perfectly understandable that a whole generation of women was proud to leave the stove behind.

But like Pollan, I find the statistics alarming. The amount of time we spend on food preparation has fallen by about 40 percent since 1965. At the same time Americans have added about an extra month a year to the time they spend at work. We are getting obese eating all this factory-produced, high-fat food. And we are losing a major pleasure in life. The basic skills involved in cooking--perhaps always devalued as "women's work"--are all but lost. "Who is going to teach the next generation to cook? I don't see it,” says Harry Balzer, the researcher Pollan interviews about the decline of American cooking.

It's worth noting that it wasn't feminism that drove American women out of the kitchen. It was corporate food production. "For many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods," Pollan writes, "regarding them as a dereliction of their 'moral obligation to cook,' something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with chid care. It took years of clever, dedicated marketing to break down this resistance and persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking."

This idea--that food is something you buy at the store, pre-made--has taken hold so completely now that it no longer seems like a choice. It was only very recently that I began to notice how little most people actually cook. My own mother is a fantastic cook and she imparted a lot of basic cooking sense to me. My dad, who loves food, made all my breakfasts and lunches as a kid and rhapsodized about the dinners my mother made. My family's enthusiasm for cooking and eating shaped my own attitudes profoundly. I didn't do a lot of cooking as a single person. But I married someone who loves to cook and eat, and making meals seems like a central part of family life. Last night, when I was half way through Pollan's article, I stopped to cook dinner with my kids. My five-year-old battered the chicken, my two-year-old washed the potatoes and green beans. This is how we spend many late afternoons. It's messy and hot and harried sometimes. But it is also often the best part of the day. My kids love cooking. And they already have some basic skills. They know, for example, that bread has to rise before it's ready to bake: their dad makes bread several times a week.

Not only are they part of the next generation that is getting some cooking skills, they are gaining some other Luddite attributes as well. Balzer, the researcher who predicts "100 years of packaged meals" in the Pollan article, says off-handedly, Who cares? "Do you miss sewing or darning socks? I don't think so."

As it happens, this week my mother has started "sewing camp" with my eight-year-old daughter. I got the same lessons from my grandmother. And while I don't currently sew, I love it that my mom makes many of my kids' clothes.

I feel duty bound to add, here, that my mom worked full-time until last year. My model for family life is hardly the suburban-housewife model. When I was little it was my mother who was the main breadwinner for our family, and my dad, an artist, took care of the house and built a spectacular garden.

Maybe that's why I don't instinctively recoil from some of these domestic activities. They don't seem obligatory to my gender.

Even if no one is cooking anymore, the whole topic is likely to reignite the good mom/bad mom debate, which is hotter than ever, judging by the firestorm around author Ayelet Waldman's book on the subject.

Like Waldman, I am sympathetic to the pangs of women trying to figure out how to do a whole bunch of fulltime jobs at once, and melting down from the stress. Clearly, women are still shouldering way more than their share of housework.

According to a University of Michigan study published last year marriage creates an extra seven hours of housework per week for women, while saving men an hour a week on chores.

The same goes for child-rearing. Waldman made a big splash when she wrote that she loves her husband more than her children. I guess for her it was a kind of declaration of independence from the idea of all-consuming maternal love. But it would be a bummer of a world without consuming love or delicious meals.

It doesn't seem like much of a solution to reject whole areas of satisfying human endeavor because they've been tainted by sexism.

If there is a feminist case against cooking, it is not because of the activity itself. It is because of the obligatory, servile, feminine-mystique overtones.

But the research Pollan quotes demonstrates that, at least where cooking is concerned, those days are over. Maybe we can start from the ground up and rebuild a culture of valuing skills and activities that unhook us from the mega-marketplace of corporate food and clothing production and give us the satisfaction of being able to take charge of some of these most basic aspects of our lives ourselves.