Family dinner is an intractable problem, one that many mothers have longed to get around for decades. After all, families need to eat dinner every night. And someone needs to make it.
Enter frozen dinners, Rachael Ray’s 30 minute-meals, take-out, and other such shortcuts that have served as the silent heroes of women’s liberation.
But in the last decade, the movement to return to simpler, less-processed foods has reestablished the pressure for parents (mostly mothers) to get back in the kitchen and slow simmer a stew. That many find this pressure to be a burden should come as no surprise.