In his bestselling 1888 sci-fi novel, Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy envisioned the year 2000 as a socialist utopia where cooking and housework was done by a cheerful "industrial army." Efficiency expert Martha Bensley Bruère promoted the idea of cooperative apartment buildings with meals and maid service.

There were attempts to implement these ideas—a public kitchen at Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago; Boston's New England Kitchen, which sold cheap but nutritious meals to factory girls in the North End; World War II munitions factories which had canteens selling affordable healthy family dinners for its female workers to take home at the end of shifts. But these were largely short-lived, either because of the un-tastiness of their food (the Italian immigrants in Boston were not fond of the bland, garlic-free New England Kitchen meals), or their temporary natures.

Today, it's the received wisdom among the educated middle-class that home-cooking is best: best for health, best for budget, best for the environment, best even for children's development (the importance of sit-down family dinner, which we've heard about ad nauseam for the past 20 years, is not borne out by research, by the way). Celebrity endorsements have only made this "common sense" more entrenched. In her Let's Move initiative, Michelle Obama promotes home cooking as key to combating childhood obesity. On Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, the British celebrity chef descended on Huntington, West Virginia to teach residents how to cook as a means of reducing the region's epic levels of obesity and diabetes. Mark Bittman has made his career plugging for home cooking against fast food, trying to demonstrate that a home-cooked meal is in fact cheaper (though he doesn't factor in time and labor costs).

"The real challenge is not 'I'm too busy to cook.'" Bittman insists. "In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour and a half of television per day. The time is there."

And, yes, clearly eating healthy dinners at home is a much better option than eating a Whopper, a Bloomin' Onion, or a plate of steak frites at your local bistro. And cooking at home is delightful—if you like to cook. There's nothing wrong with teaching people how to cook—the more people who like to do it, the better, I say.

But many people don't like to cook, even those who know how. And many people who do like to cook don't like to do it after a long day at work. TV time, or other forms of relaxation, are not fungible with time spent cooking dinner.

This is hard to understand for many of us middle—and upper-middle class Americans, for whom cooking is a hobby and a form of relaxation, especially fulfilling after a day spent sitting motionless at a computer. We have the education and leisure time to cultivate cooking skills, enjoy farmer's markets as a form of recreation and social activity, indulge in food porn in Saveur or TasteSpotting.com. And when we don't want to cook, we can afford to go to Whole Foods or have sushi.