Don't forget work.

"I still make salad from scratch occasionally, but it has begun to seem like a lot of work."

Time is widely recognized as the major currency of our times--so much so that saving work has been begun to seem to take a distant second place as a trend and purchase driver. Until women started working out of the home, and hours and minutes started disappearing in larger and larger numbers, "Less work for Mother" had been the driving force behind convenience foods as a whole, and the justification for thousands of successful (and tens of thousands of failed) food products developed and introduced during the last century.

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Fifty years ago it was the advertising theme of a before-its-time restaurant and prepared food take-out chain called Horn and Hardart's, The chain died because it thought it was about innovative ways of vending its foods through "automats" when its true excellence was cooking and packaging better-tasting home-style take-home foods than most moms could fix at home--even at a time when most moms thought they could cook, or were forced to learn how.

The amount and kinds of work mothers were and are willing to do to feed the family has changed dramatically since them. The number of ready-to-serve and almost ready-to-serve products has leaped from a few dozen to a few thousand. What mothers think of as "cooking" today is a lot different than what they thought of as "cooking" five, ten, or twenty or fifty years ago. It would be wonderful to see a chart or graph depicting a century's changes in the definitions of cooking and work. Without such charts, we have to rely on changes in average prep times, the sales history of TV dinners, and experience that says that in recent years, saving prep time and enabling mobility have gotten more media, manufacturing, and marketing attention, than saving work.

Many of today's business reports actually define and describe convenience in terms of time rather than work--here is a 2005 description of dinner prep time from the NPD Group and Food Channel: "Everyone wants more convenience in the kitchen. The NPD Group, a market research firm, reports that half of American cooks are putting dinner on the table in 30 minutes or less, often by eliminating side dishes and even desserts, which are now served after only 14% of at-home suppers." Even FMI is defining easier prep in time terms: "Look for more prepped items in the produce aisles, such as chopped onions, bagged washed greens and more high-quality starter kits (which you'll combine with other ingredients for your own spin). Supermarkets will respond by offering the help we need, said Michael Sansolo of the Food Marketing Institute of Washington, D.C. 'We're very time-pressed, so we continue to look for products that will help us get breakfast, lunch and dinner on the table,' he said."

In recent weeks, I took a camera crew on a series of a series of home visits looking at working mothers' use of pre-cut fruits and veggies. I was somewhat surprised to learn how much time the mothers thought they saved on a single bag of salad (compared with cutting up and rinsing greens on their own). I was more surprised to hear almost all of busy the mothers I visited on Saturday tell me that when it came to pre-cut veggies, the work-saving was just as or more important to them than the time-saving.

One of the mothers had four unopened bags of mixed green salad in her refrigerator. She was expecting dinner guests the following day, and this was the easy way to fix salad for company as well as for her own family.

One of the other mothers had started buying pre-cuts for her mother when "mom" was recovering from hip surgery and couldn't stand up long enough to cut and wash salad greens. "Mom loved it, and once I saw how much easier it was, I got into buying it for us too. I still make salad from scratch occasionally, but it has begun to seem like a lot of work."

How long will it be before cutting up greens and expansive bulk produce departments are taken over by packaged pre-cuts?

It took about a century for ready-to-wear clothing to replace handmade clothing and for dressmakers and tailors to go the way of corner stores. One hundred years to go from 99% sew-it-yourself to 99% ready-to-wear. It probably won't take nearly that long to make pre-cut veggies seem like the natural way of doing things. More and more meat and poultry is oven-ready or ready to eat. In fact, it's getting hard to distinguish between some parts of the "fresh" meat case and what was called the deli case until the millennium.