Pull out an old family cookbook, and dinner from another era seems much easier to complete. There are handwritten notes, long ingredient lists, and recipes that call for several pots on the stove, all pointing to a meal with more than one task underway. Together, they make cooking seem like a fixed part of the day, with much of the meal’s work happening at home in the kitchen. Our meals don’t look this way anymore.
That difference can make it seem as though cooking changed overnight. In reality, it was a gradual change. When we get down to brass tax, it’s simply that people spend less time preparing food than they did decades ago, more food is bought in convenient forms, and a larger share of food spending goes to meals prepared away from home.
Cooking Takes Less Time Than It Once Did
A Nutrition Journal study looked at six nationally representative U.S. dietary surveys and six time-use studies conducted between 1965 and 2008, giving researchers a look at changes over more than four decades. The research brings together information on what people ate and how they spent their time preparing food, and it found significant declines across socioeconomic groups in both food-preparation time and the share of daily energy from home food sources. The biggest declines happened between 1965 and 1992, while the trend had mostly leveled off after the mid-1990s; home food sources still supplied 65% to 72% of daily energy in 2007–2008.
The same study also shows a change in who reported cooking, tracking both the share of adults who cooked and their time spent on days they did. Among adults ages 19 to 60, the share of men who cooked rose from 29% in 1965–1966 to 42% in 2007–2008, and their average cooking time on days they cooked rose from 37.4 to 45.0 minutes. For women, the share who cooked fell from 92% to 68%, while average cooking time among those who cooked fell from 112.8 to 65.6 minutes. The numbers show a shift in who reported doing food preparation as the overall time spent on it went down.
Cooking hasn’t vanished from daily life, despite these declining numbers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics table counts food preparation and cleanup together, and it reports that 63.8% of the civilian population aged 15 and older did one of those activities on an average weekday in 2024. Across the full civilian population, the average was 0.65 hours, or about 39 minutes. For the people who did the activity, the average was 1.02 hours, so the table gives one average for everyone and another for people who did food preparation or cleanup.
Convenience
The U.S. Department of Agriculture looks at convenience by asking how much preparation time a food saves a household, which is a simple way to think about the work that happens before eating. Its convenience-food analysis covers basic ingredients and complex ingredients, ready-to-cook foods, ready-to-eat foods, fast-food meals and snacks, and sit-down restaurant meals and snacks. Ready-to-cook foods need water or heat, while ready-to-eat foods need no preparation at all.
That definition covers a lot of ways a meal can come together before it reaches the table, from food that needs more work to food that needs little or none. In the USDA’s analysis of household spending from 1999 to 2010, basic and complex ingredients together made up less than one-quarter of the average household food budget. Ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat meals and snacks represented 26% of that budget, while meals and snacks from fast-food and sit-down restaurants represented around half of total household food spending during that period. The report classed restaurant meals and snacks as the most convenient foods in its framework.
Price and income mattered, too. The USDA found that prices and income-driven changes in total food expenditures accounted for much of the movement in food purchasing patterns between 1999 and 2010. Its full report also found that the average number of hours worked by household heads had little effect on demand for convenience foods in its analysis. Convenience isn’t simply about getting through a rushed weekday evening; the purchasing data show that time-saving foods compete with other household priorities, including price and income.
Household Size and Food Service
The number of one-person households has grown sharply: the Census Bureau reported that 27.6% of occupied U.S. households were one-person households in 2020, compared with seven point seven percent in 1940. Its household report says the share increased every decade from 1940 to 2020. More households are now planning meals for one person rather than several.
Food spending has also moved further toward food-away-from-home channels. In the USDA’s Food Dollar data for domestically produced food, spending on food away from home rose 4.2% to $1.27 trillion in 2024, while food-at-home spending rose 1.4% to $901 billion. Food services supplied 38.6 cents of value added for every domestic food dollar in 2024, up 1.1 cents from 2023. The Food Dollar measures costs and value added along the domestic food supply chain.
Taken together, these changes leave room in American food culture for very different kinds of home meals. A home meal can begin with basic ingredients, a partly prepared grocery item, or food made by a restaurant. The historical study counted food purchased at stores, convenience stores, and grocery delis as home food sources, even though those items could have been fully prepared before purchase. That means a meal eaten at home can involve very little food preparation in the household, which helps explain why American cooking has changed as the definition of a practical meal has expanded and dinner now draws from more places than a single family kitchen.
KEEP ON READING
20 Food-Related Art Projects
