Food and Wine magazine, when I cook a big meal for my family, I’m not just offering nourishment and fostering important domestic traditions (and, according to studies on childhood obesity, improving my child’s chances of staying at a healthy weight), I’m “wasting money and destroying the environment.”

this onefor a meatloaf that serves twenty. That’s not a meat loaf, that’s a meat couch.

published an interview with food writer Michael Pollan about his new Netflix seriesCookedwhich is based on his 2013 book of the same title. Pollan is trying hard to demystify cooking while encouraging people to get back to the kitchen. About cooking, Pollan told Food and Wine:

We’ve been brainwashed to think of [cooking] as drudgery… The story I’m telling is a very simple story…Which is: Look how valuable [cooking] is. Look how interesting it is. Look how pleasurable it can be.

Food and Wine’s positions on cooking. Should I or shouldn’t I?

Food and Wine writer Mike Pomranz has a sense of humor. After breaking the grim news that I and other kitchen dwellers hate the earth, he offered a “shout out to ambivalent and absentee mothers everywhere!” Evidently these women “get it”: they neglect their kids’ meals and yet they are the real earth mothers!

movie is a new study published in the Journal of Food Products Marketing (whatever that is), titled “Wasted Positive Intentions: The Role of Affection and Abundance on Household Food Waste.” Pomranz offers this summary:

As many can probably relate to, the research found that mothers (or, more broadly, caregivers) often like to serve large meals to show affection for their family. Families who have faced food insecurity in the past are more likely to keep extra food on hand. But having more food also led to more waste, which not only has the much discussed global impact, but also a personal financial impact: wasting $371 on average per person in the US per year.

Food and Wine piece) is that the researchers only include twenty individuals in the study’s sample size. While one can certainly derive some information from a study that small, it’s hardly big enough to make the rather dramatic conclusion that we should all be taking a sledgehammer to our kitchens.

largest study on childhood obesity was conducted in 2010 by Ohio State University and found that children are more likely to stay at a healthy weight if they eat dinner with their families more than five times a week. Limiting television watching and getting ten or more hours of sleep a night were also shown to benefit kids.

Australian study of overweight children found that children lost weight successfully when their parents were also involved in diet programs, compared to programs that only involved the children. These studies suggest that the key to controlling childhood obesity is hands-on parenting and more home cooked meals.

Food and Wine; the magazine probably needs to move away from writing about scientific studies and stick to recipe testing and pretty pictures of dinner parties. After all, encouraging people to stop cooking is a recipe for disaster for a cooking magazine.