2,000 Calories

A common theme in writing about the virtues of home cooking is that when you cook your own food, you can control the elements that can be bad for you: fat, net calories, salt, sugar, etc.

A beautiful photo essay about how easy it is to shovel in 2,000 calories led me to a Bittman opinion piece in which he interviews Pollan and caused thousands (millions?) of ethicurian foodies to explode in virtue-gasms. As Pollan is quoted saying, "It's the collapse of home cooking that led directly to the obesity epidemic."

They've got a point, it's hard to hide calories in your own cooking (once when I was in high school I made fettuccine Alfredo and was horrified at how much cream it took), and I believe that a lot of people would be a lot thinner if they cooked their own food. That said, I think we've got an inactivity problem too, and as a person who has mostly cooked for himself for years and has managed to gain more weight that I've wanted to at times, I'm pretty sure we can get fat on home cooking too if we fry everything and bake too many cookies.

I think they also trivialize the challenges to home cooking: the drudgery of chopping, the time it takes to clean up, the economic forces that lead all adults in a household to work full days.