Guest-posting for Yglesias, Jamelle Bouie points out that obesity isn’t an easy a problem to solve:

It’s not that healthier ingredients are absent or too expensive — even lower-priced supermarkets have plenty of fresh produce available — it’s that preparing those meals requires more time and energy than is available to most lower-income people. Cooking takes time, and after a long day of hard work in low-wage employment, parents want to relax, and the incredible ease of fast and processed food is a powerful lure. Indeed, if there’s any advantage to lower-income grocery stores Kroger or Wal-Mart, it’s that calorie dense foods — cookies, frozen pizza, Easy Mac — are cheap and readily available.

That said, if there’s anything I’ve learned from watching my friends attempt to navigate the kitchen, it’s that cooking isn’t obvious. Unless you’re familiar with the basics of preparation and cooking, the act of taking a few ingredients — some cornmeal, a bushel of greens, an egg — and making a meal is mystifying. Poor people are simply less likely to have access to that kind of knowledge. Moreover, eating habits are generational, and if you grew up in a home where food was prepared from fresh ingredients you’re far more likely to know what to do in a kitchen. By contrast, if you grew up eating processed and prepackaged food, then those are the first things you’ll reach for when you’re on your own.

I don’t think it’s really that difficult to learn to cook, but habits are hard to break, especially since people are horrible at judging their calorie intakes¹, and nutrition information can be wildly inaccurate. Also, I don’t mind an hour or two in the kitchen, but I don’t have a physically strenuous job, kids or a dog that need attention when I get home.

However, this seems a problem tailor-made for home economics classes–or at least, the way Judd Apatow and I envision home ec, since it was gone by the time I made it to junior high and high school.

Tangentially, it seems like there’s some sort of official “blogger vacation week” happening now. I’m entirely fine with it, though, since several of my normal reads were guest bloggers somewhere or other.