The spirit is willing, but....

So much for my resolution not to spend so much time online. This morning I popped over to Rebecca's Pocket, one of the first sites to which I linked here. She recommended a metasite, dangerousmeta!, which links to environmental stories, among many other topics.

An interesting story via dangerousmeta! is: "Cooking in Danger of Becoming a Lost Art Among Generation Y".

'What my students call cooking, I call reheating,' says Miriam Chaikin, a professor of anthropology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. 'They think heating up a frozen pizza is cooking.'

They are kitchen illiterates.

While Chaikin had been more inclined to study the food habits of faraway peoples, she turned her attention to young Americans after inviting some students to a potluck supper. 'One or two brought cooked food,' she says, 'but the rest just showed up with a bag of chips.'

Could it be that kids had no idea how to cook? To find out, Chaikin sent her assistant to the local grocery to photograph the contents of students' shopping carts. The results were very encouraging - for Swanson's shareholders.

'Only 12 percent of the things they were buying gave clear evidence of cooking - things like oil or fresh vegetables or baking supplies,' says Chaikin. The rest were convenience items like frozen dinners and deli sandwiches or plain old junk food and soda.

However, I don't know how representative college students would be of a generation's cooking habits. Perhaps a study of people in their first jobs beyond school would be more telling.

Another site via Rebecca, Miss Vickie, is all about pressure cooking.