The problem is that none of this actually easy. Not the one-minute pie dough or the quick kale chips or the idiot-proof Massaman curry, every last ounce of which is made from scratch, from ingredients that are sourced and bought and lugged home and washed, peeled, chopped, mixed, and cooked. Meanwhile, technology has made appetizing, affordable cooking alternatives easier and easier to come by. Food delivery services like Seamless, Munchery, and SpoonRocket carry prepared meals to your home in minutes. Kitchensurfing will send you a personal chef at reasonable cost. The rise of fast casual restaurants from Chipotle to Sweetgreen has made counter-service takeout a dinner option that won’t make you hate yourself in the morning.

All this means that tonight, I can order excellent pad thai from my phone in under a minute. Or, I can find a recipe for “easy” pad thai, run—literally, run—to the grocery store at lunch, hope that grocery store sells fish sauce, then spend 40 minutes making the dish and 20 minutes cleaning up. The decision to cook from scratch may have many virtues, but ease is not one of them. Despite what we’re told, cooking the way so many Americans aspire to do it today is never fast, and rarely easy compared to all the other options available for feeding ourselves.

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It wasn’t always thus. Promises of ease in the kitchen took hold in the 1940s and 50s, thanks to the flood of women entering the workplace, a newly industrialized food supply, and the invention and marketing of a whole range of timesaving kitchen gadgets. Before that, books about cooking largely admitted what every homemaker knew to be true: that feeding people was backbreaking work, and then you died. But suddenly there was GE’s “Care Free Cooking Electrically,” a pamphlet promoting the electric range; Glamour magazine’s After 5 Cookbook for the working woman; Good Housekeeping’s Quick & Easy Cookbook. What separates these from the books we have today is that the recipes are, largely speaking, actually pretty easy. Take, for example, this salad recipe from the After 5 Cookbook: “Break escarole in pieces. Sprinkle with 1 tbs. lemon juice. Serve with mayonnaise.” It’s practically a haiku.

Things shifted in the late 1980s. Food culture emerged. Dean & DeLuca started doing a brisk business in luxury foods, dining out became a sport, and Americans aspired to make much more sophisticated food in their homes. It was the age of pesto, quiche, and imported olive oils, and suddenly recipes calling for “a can of asparagus” or “a box of lime Jell-O” no longer seemed au courant. But the recipes continued to be labeled “quick” and “easy,” and there the problems began.

Take, for example, a panzanella recipe from the “Speedy Salads” section of Anne Willan’s In & Out of the Kitchen In 15 Minutes or Less, a cookbook from 1995. The recipe fills an entire eight-by-10-inch page and requires one to mince garlic, chiffonade basil, de-seed and small-dice a cucumber, small-dice two onions, et cetera. Estimated time commitment: 10 minutes, which is roughly what it would take me to locate all the ingredients in my kitchen (and if 10 minutes is too long, Willan has a from-scratch Chicken in Chili Coconut Sauce that you should have no trouble dashing off in nine. Nine minutes!)