This article was produced by The Bittman Project and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. which supports independent journalists as they forward fresh narratives about inequality. It is co-published here with permission. EHRP’s high-quality journalism is co-published with mainstream media outlets, to help readers understand and address systemic hardship. Cooking and food shopping are very different in America than they used to be. For one thing, there’s an often overwhelming “time tax” on many workers, leaving us with mere minutes for cooking–the average American has only about 39 minutes to devote to food preparation and clean up per day, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2022.