Home cooking loses ground.

Consumers who are consciously putting home cooking behind them told us: "Been there, done that" or "It's too much work" or "It takes too much time." One newly retired respondent, who might be expected to have plenty of time to cook now that she isn't working, wrote that "Life is too short to spend much time in the kitchen."

If this survey had been conducted one hundred years ago, a similar percentage of respondents would have probably said the same thing about home sewing. Today, consumers who make their own clothes are an increasingly rare breed, and we hear more about home-schooling than home sewing.

Although 54 percent of the respondents said that they are paying attention to home cooking these days, 24 percent of the same base said they are paying less attention to home cooking today than they did two or three years ago. Reinforcing the force of this declining attention, the only other item on our long list to come anywhere close in declining attention was recipes--11 percent of our respondents said they were less interested in recipes now than they were a few years ago. Since consumers can usually be counted on to be contradictory in some respects, the 11 percent recipe decline was offset by 27 percent who said they were more interested in recipes today than two or three years ago.