I almost don't know what to excerpt for your previewing pleasure -- the whole thing was so darn good. (And if you would like to read further about some of his arguments that, from an evolutionary biology perspective, cooking is an essential human activity, read The Hungry Soul by Leon Kass.)
Excerpts:
On Julia Child: "Julia’s voice was like nothing I ever heard before or would hear again until Monty Python came to America: vaguely European, breathy and singsongy, and weirdly suggestive of a man doing a falsetto impression of a woman. The BBC supposedly took 'The French Chef' off the air because viewers wrote in complaining that Julia Child seemed either drunk or demented."
On the Food Network's rise and home cooking's decline: "How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves?"
On enjoying engaging your mind, senses, hands: "Cooking for [Julia Child] was so much more than a means to a meal. It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles.... You did it to please yourself.... I suspect we’re drawn to the textures and rhythms of 
kitchen work, too, which seem so much more direct and satisfying than the more abstract and formless tasks most of us perform in our jobs nowadays." (This is one of the major reasons I love to cook. It makes me feel creative, sensually engaged, meditative when alone and fulfillingly social with other people.)
kitchen work, too, which seem so much more direct and satisfying than the more abstract and formless tasks most of us perform in our jobs nowadays." (This is one of the major reasons I love to cook. It makes me feel creative, sensually engaged, meditative when alone and fulfillingly social with other people.)On competitive cooking television: "If you ask me, the key to victory on any of these shows comes down to one factor: bacon. Whichever contestant puts bacon in the dish invariably seems to win."
On why you might think we don't cook as much now: "For many years now, Americans have been putting in longer hours at work and enjoying less time at home. Since 1967, we’ve added 167 hours — the equivalent of a month’s full-time labor — to the total amount of time we spend at work each year, and in households where both parents work, the figure is more like 400 hours. Americans today spend more time working than people in any other industrialized nation — an extra two weeks or more a year."
On the real reason why we don't cook as much now: "[Americans] now allow corporations to cook for them when they can.... The shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supply-driven phenomenon.... It took years of clever, dedicated marketing to... persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking."
On the state of the table now: "The corporate project of redefining what it means to cook and serve a meal has succeeded beyond the industry’s wildest expectations.... Today, 80 percent of the cost of food eaten in the home goes to someone other than a farmer, which is to say to industrial cooking and packaging and marketing."
On why cooking is fundamental to human culture: "Cooking made us who we are.... It was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors... [that allowed] our brains to grow bigger.... Freed from the need to spend our days gathering large quantities of raw food and then chewing (and chewing) it, humans could now devote their time, and their metabolic resources, to other purposes, like creating a culture. Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would likely have fed himself on the go and alone, like the animals. (Or, come to think of it, like the industrial eaters we’ve become, grazing at gas stations and skipping meals.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, all served to civilize us.”
On how we're suffering from the decline of home cooking: "A 2003 study by a group of Harvard economists led by David Cutler found that the rise of food preparation outside the home could explain most of the increase in obesity in America.... As the 'time cost' of food preparation has fallen, calorie consumption has gone up.... As the amount of time Americans spend cooking has dropped by about half, the number of meals Americans eat in a day has climbed; since 1977, we’ve added approximately half a meal to our daily intake.... Obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation.... Cooking is [also] a better predictor of a healthful diet than social class: a 1992 study in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that poor women who routinely cooked were more likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not."
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