When it comes to eating at home, meal preparation is an upfront cost; consuming the meal happens downstream. Hyperbolic discounting suggests, therefore, that as the cost (e.g., hassles) associated with meal preparation decrease, the number of meals should increase. And this is exactly what researchers have found.
[Harvard economist David] Cutler and his colleagues demonstrate that as the “time cost” of food preparation has fallen, calorie consumption has gone up, particularly consumption of the sort of snack and convenience foods that are typically cooked outside the home. They found that when we don’t have to cook meals, we eat more of them: as the amount of time Americans spend cooking has dropped by about half, the number of meals Americans eat in a day has climbed; since 1977, we’ve added approximately half a meal to our daily intake.
Cutler and his colleagues also surveyed cooking patterns across several cultures and found that obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in the labor force or income.
So french fries are paradigmatic. What used to be a bog production (cutting the potatoes, heating the frying oil) reserved for special occasions can now be routinely enjoyed (spread frozen fries on a cookie sheet, pop them into your oven).
Interestingly, some of the foods that were the easiest to prepare in the past — think fresh fruits and vegetables — are now losing to fries and ready-to-eat snacks. Prior to this revolution, we were more inclined to eat healthier snacks, not because they were better for us… but because they required less upfront work.
[...] assert that the reduction in meal preparation time (due to better food processing and storage) has caused people to add additional meals to their days. As the cost of preparation (upfront cost) diminishes, people engage in the behavior (making a [...]
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