by Pamela Sosnowski

Created on: May 24, 2009

Despite the rise of celebrity chefs and reality cooking shows during the past decade, it seems that it's becoming less and less common to meet people who can navigate their way around a kitchen. Many people rely on frozen meals and the office cafeteria for lunch during the week, and get their dinner from a restaurant or fast food joint on a regular basis. Many celebrities who appear on Martha Stewart's daytime show admit to the domestic diva herself that they don't know the difference between a spatula and a skimmer (in an especially cringe-worth moment, Barry Manilow asked Martha what a whisk was used for.) For many people, cooking is an intimidating, untouchable creative art, comparable to fashion design or carpentry. That whirring sound you hear isn't a food processor that someone turned on, but Julia Child turning in her grave.

Why has cooking seemingly fallen so far out of favor? I believe the shift started somewhere around the 1930s. Before then, with few methods of food preservation available, and with processed food still in the early stages, you had to either use it or lose it, and that meant cooking and consuming fresh food on a regular basis, before it spoiled. In 1925, a biologist and inventor named Clarence Birdseye perfected a method of quick-freezing fish. In 1929, he sold his patents to two companies that eventually became the consumer goods conglomerate, General Mills. By the following year General Mills was testing Birdseye's freezing methods on several foods including meat, vegetables, and fruit, and it became a huge success. Enter an increase in processed foods throughout the 20th century, and fast food restaurants such as McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a food revolution was under way.

Time also plays a giant factor in how likely people are willing to cook. As more women entered the workplace in the 1960s and 1970s, that meant less time to put together a home cooked meal for the family table. When the microwave oven took off in the 1970s, it meant most working parents could choose convenience over nutritional value. Today, with people putting in more weekly hours at work then ever before, it's a challenge to cook a quick, easy, and nutritious meal, despite the fact that cooking is far more economical than buying take out.

What your parents practice and teach you also has an influence in how comfortable you are with cooking. One of my grandmothers, for example, who was only 12 years old when she arrived in the United States from

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