Declining cooking times in France and the USA since the 1980s.

Summary Home cooking is a key element of family meals. While many worries have been expressed about the decline in family meals and cooking, empirical assessments and explanations to this decline are lacking. This paper examines whether the fall in cooking times at the household level is due to changes in behaviours or changes in the population composition. It relies on data from the Time use surveys in 1985 and 2010 in two countries with contrasting food cultures, France and the US. In each country, we use Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, a technique that allows decomposing a difference into what is attributable to changes in regression coefficients and what is due to changes in the distribution of the explanatory variables. We review a range of explanatory hypotheses to the decline in cooking times and confront them to our empirical results. Our conclusions are that the main vehicles for changes in food preparation times are changes in the population composition, specifically the rise in female employment and single-adult households, which are partly countered by the population aging. Changes in behaviours form a fragmented and inconclusive picture but changes in working women’s behaviours do not seem to contribute to the decline in cooking.