A friend invited me to join a social media group he’s set up that focuses on food. His friends — and he’s got many — have been posting the most amazing pictures of the most incredible things they’ve been cooking. It got me thinking today about what and how we eat.

I had a colleague who admitted to me that she and her husband almost never eat at home. “We go out every night because no one feels like cooking,” she laughed. And I recall reading an article somewhere some ten or so years ago about apartments built without a kitchen with the assumption that the owner/renter would eat out every day. Such eating misses out on what’s truly amazing about food, the creation process behind it. Often, for me, the preparation is just as enjoyable as the meal itself: having taken over Thanksgiving dinner for our family, I’m already beginning to think about what to cook. At the same time, though, I understand that that’s probably the case only because I cook so infrequently.

For K, who does most of the cooking, I think it’s not always quite as enjoyable, all the chopping and cutting and slicing and stirring. She often begins the cooking at night, after the kids have gone to bed, getting as much of it done before going to bed. Soups, for instance, are almost always completely done before she goes to bed. And while she does truly enjoy cooking (though perhaps baking a little more, I suspect), sometimes it can be just a drudgery for her.

That leads to the second half of my thoughts: the what. We rarely eat anything that could be called “processed.” Sure, we use canned beans in chili most of the time, and we sometimes cheat with this or that, but it’s usually what folks here in the south would call scratch cooking. K’s soups always begin with a pot full of vegetables and a couple of pieces of meat. And in recent years, we haven’t even bought sandwich meats all that much, preferring our own smoked meats to anything you can get in the store.

There’s a joy in that as well — the cutting of the wood, the preparation of the brine solution for marinating, the tending of the fire. It’s another case of the process being as enjoyable as the product. It all takes time, a finite resource that’s even scarcer when one figures the children into the equation. Yet what else is one going to spend the time doing? And besides, few things bring together a family as effectively as a good meal.

Perhaps a bonfire, with s’mores.