This piece reminds me a bit of what my mom and I were talking about last weekend. She was complaining that she could not find a can of sour cherries to make a cherry pie (she looked in three grocery stores and eventually resorted to cherry pie filling), and noted that her grocery store at home was carrying fewer and fewer staples while its deli section was getting bigger and bigger. There are so many people who don't know how (or don't think they have time) to cook from scratch, and it disturbs me that are people out there who don't even think that's a problem (the idea that the only people who cook from scratch are people with too much time on their hands.)
And yet everywhere you look you see more cookbooks, more TV chefs, more expensive cookware for sale. Who's using all this stuff?
