Yay! Less dieters! Amaaazing!

Excerpts from a nice good-news story in the New York Times about the decrease in dieting, and increase of home-cooking. Especially interesting is this idea that cooking is a practice we've lost and need to pick up again. I used to think I was "not a good cook" (except baking!) until two summers ago when I said to myself: Self, you is an academic. And if academics are good at anything, it's learning the basics of ANYTHING... from a book.

So I started picking up vegan cookbooks that were well reviewed on amazon, and that looked quick, and I taughts myself how to cook well. I've been so amazed at the results, Eating Out doesn't hold much allure for me anymore, because good vegetarian food is so hard to find--even what I cook is usually better. And I've followed the books enough now that I can experiment a little without things going horribly wrong. (I toyed with a black bean salad recipe this week and it worked! I toyed with spaghetti sauce and it worked!)

The bottom line is... if I can learn to cook decent (and often delish) meals in one summer, so can any fool. It can't be that much of a lost art. I will add, however, that it requires lots of base ingredients to be on hand, and to have an organized kitchen.

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AFTER decades of obsessing about fat, calories and carbs, many dieters have made the unorthodox decision to simply enjoy food again.

... The percentage of those consumers who are on a diet is lower than at any time since information on dieting was first collected in 1985. At the peak in 1990, 39 percent of the women and 29 percent of the men were dieting. Today, that number has dropped to 26 percent of women and 16 percent of men.

The diarists also report eating more organic foods and whole grains, said Harry Balzer, an NPD vice president.

...In May, the market research firm Information Resources reported that 53 percent of consumers say they are cooking from scratch more than they did just six months ago, in part, no doubt, because of the rising cost of prepared foods.

...“We need to demystify cooking,” Ms. Waters said. “It creates feelings about food that make you feel cared for, and that’s the kind of food that really changes habits.”

The cookbook author and television personality Rachael Ray has attracted both loyal followers and harsh critics for creating food that doesn’t focus on calories, fat, carbohydrates or even portion control. She intentionally doesn’t include calorie information with her cookbook recipes.

“I think that puts your head into science and away from what I think the experience of food should be,” Ms. Ray said.

...“If everyone ate more plant-based and more whole foods and unprocessed foods, that would be major,” said Arlene Spark, associate professor of nutrition at Hunter College in New York. “But that would mean people going back to cooking, and what we’ve lost is people’s ability and knowledge of how to cook.”

...Last year, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported on a study of 97 obese women, all of whom were avoiding high-fat foods. Half the women were instructed to increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables. By the end of a year, the women who were focused on adding vegetables lost an average of 17 pounds, 20 percent more than the women who were just paying attention to fat consumption.

Also, the more time people spend on tasks like food shopping, cooking and kitchen cleanup, the more likely they are to be of average weight. The Economic Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture found that people of normal weight spend more time on meal-related tasks than people who are overweight or underweight.