"Serving pre-prepared food doesn't mean you're a bad parent"

The above statement is the title of a CNN article and one that I'm inclined to agree to. This whole emphasis on doing everything from scratch, farm-to-table cooking, etc. seems to go too far for average folk. Yet I wonder if one could revise that title a bit to come up with a slightly different statement that might also be valid: intentionally excluding your child from food prep does make you a bad parent.

A common theme that I found when reading this book on why people didn't learn to cook seemed to pretty closely resemble the following excerpt of that CNN piece:

My mother's own mother had refused to teach her to cook, thinking that it would trap my mother in the home rather than in the world of work where my grandmother thought she should live.

She later notes on her mother's later attempts at cooking that:

... it has never been easy for her the way it has for mothers who have cooked from scratch since they were little girls.

And finally goes on to say that

Even those of us with more time or money than our struggling parents have a hard time cooking because we didn't learn how to do it well as children. Dinner prep looks easy in the hands of a pro, can take as little as 20 minutes and tastes delicious. When I'm in charge, it’s harder and takes longer and could involve a TV bribe to keep my kid from amused while I try to cook.

That sounds rather like a cascade failure, passing down through the generations, causing her to be less efficient at making meals, and likely both increasing her family's food costs as well as decreasing the nutrional value of meals that her children eat. Eating out tends to be more harmful to the environment too.

A far more reasonable action for that grandmother to take would, IMO, be not to intentionally exclude her daughter(s) from the kitchen but to bring in her son(s) as well. Perhaps if the woman in this case had learned to cook well as a child, then rather than having to spend time with her children outside the arena of food prep perhaps her children might be able to gradually learn as they grow to at first "help" and later help with the cooking.