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a glacier into a puddle on the floor. Her kitchen remained pristine. “That’s because I don’t use it that much!” she said, laughing nervously.
    Terri struggled to find the motivation to cook for herself. Dinner tended to be takeout oriented. “I rely on Chinese food and baguette sandwiches from a local bakery,” she said. “I make far too many runs to McDonald’s and Jack in the Box for burgers, shakes, that sort of thing.” Most weeks, she ordered a large pizza and ate it over the course of two or three days.
    â€œThe thing is that I like vegetables, but I don’t feel like I cook them very well. I also tend to go overboard at the farmers’ market and then I find all this stuff dead in my fridge.” The previous summer, she had signed up for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) basket filled with fresh produce direct from a farmer. “Even though I got it every other week, it was still too much for one person. I felt even worse when that went bad.”
    Her fridge was a graveyard of expired condiments, a heavy vine of aging grapes, and a container of Greek yogurt with an eightmonth-old expiration date. She pointed to a few jars with unidentifiable goo in them. “Attempts at making vinaigrette,” she said, nodding. “I make too much so it stays in there forever.”
    The freezer was equally stark; one of its few contents was a four-year-old turkey dinner. “That’s from a Thanksgiving when I decided I couldn’t deal with my family,” she said, then laughed nervously again. On Thanksgiving, she went to McDonald’s. She looked a bit sad at the memory as she shut the door on the frozen-food tour.
    Her shelves were nods to healthy eating and falls from grace of it. Next to the quinoa (unopened) there was a shelf-stable microwavable meatloaf dinner and cracked bulgur next to fried onions (“for green bean casserole,” she interjected).
    For her meal, she boiled whole wheat pasta and tossed it with olive oil. “I would have no idea how to make pasta sauce,” she said, grinding sea salt onto her pasta. “I’m feeling kind of virtuous today because I’m not using Hamburger Helper or a jarred sauce.” She’d been relying on them less after she learned that she had high blood pressure. As she sat down with her pasta in a beige La-Z-Boy chair in her living room, she talked wistfully about the days when, as a newlywed, she tried her hand at cooking. She made holiday roasts and even hosted dinner parties.
    â€œI lost interest in cooking after I stopped drinking,” she said honestly. “But I’m realizing now that by not cooking I’m hurting myself, probably more than I realize. I want to be excited by it again,” she said. “I don’t want to be on a diet. I just want to change the way I eat. But I don’t know where to start or how to sustain that, you know?”
    Terri struck me as a tough case. For high blood pressure, the best step she could take would be to cook more often. The vast majority of average Americans’ sodium intake—nearly 80 percent—comes from fast food or ultraprocessed fare. By comparison, only 5 percent of sodium comes from home cooking. She mentioned time as an issue, but then talked about a lot of trips to physically pick up food and eat out, time that she might use to make dinner instead. I feared that what she wanted wasn’t cooking lessons, but a magic bullet.

DONNA
    In Tacoma, we met Donna, a shy, sweet-faced twenty-six-year-old newlywed who resided in a row of modest starter homes. Her hair reminded me of Shirley Temple’s, dark and spiraling down just above her shoulders. In a tinny, little-girl voice she asked, “Do you want any iced tea? I have some in the garage.”
    Donna was gosh-darned adorable. She and her husband had purchased the house two years earlier the week before they got married, a symbol of their mutual