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Who Has Time To Cook?
How Family Resources Influence Food Preparation
Lisa Mancino and Constance Newman
Economic Research Report No. (ERR-40), May 2007
USDA uses the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP) to show Food Stamp Program
participants how low-cost, healthy meals can be purchased with
monthly food stamp benefits. When the TFP was first created
in 1975, most families had a nonworking adult in the home who
was likely to prepare meals from scratch. Today, however, an
increasing number of low-income families have either a single
working parent or two working parents. These households may
spend less time preparing meals than was typical in the past.
Recent efforts have been made to incorporate more convenient
and commercially prepared foods into the TFP market basket.
This research supports those efforts by showing how differences
in family time resources can affect food preparation decisions.
What Is the Issue?
There is little information on how time resources influence
time spent in preparing food. Thus, to understand if and how
time use decisions vary with both time and monetary resources,
this study estimates how the amount of time an individual spends
daily in preparing food correlates with individual and household
characteristics. Does the time allocated to preparing food vary
systematically with income, wage rates, marital status, employment
status, employment status of other household adults, and the
number of children in a household?
What Did the Project Find?
Our study shows that characteristics, such as income, employment
status, gender, and family composition, clearly affect food
preparation decisions. This relationship is weakest among men,
stronger among women, and strongest of all among full-time workers
and single parents. The relationship between personal characteristics
and how much time men spend preparing food, especially low-income
men, was unclear. Our results for men also contradict the hypothesis
that lower household earnings mean more time preparing food.
For both full-time employed and nonworking men, those with lower
household income spend less time preparing food than do men
in households with higher incomes.
Regardless of income and marital status, women spend more time
preparing food than men do. Among women, time spent preparing
food in the home falls with higher household income and more
time working outside the home. Our estimates suggest that nonworking
women spend just over 70 minutes per day preparing food, whereas
women who work part-time spend 53-56 minutes per day and full-time
working women spend 38-46 minutes per day preparing food. Single
women spend less time preparing food than do married or partnered
women whether they are working or not.
Single working women spend about 15 minutes less per day preparing
food than do married or partnered working women. Single nonworking
women spend approximately 30 minutes less per day cooking than
do nonworking women who are married or have partners.
Among low- and middle-income women, time spent preparing food
does not decrease significantly with higher wage rates. Among
higher income women, however, an increase in weekly earnings
of $100 would translate into 9 fewer minutes spent in preparing
food per day.
Having more children who live in the household also increases
the time a woman spends preparing food, suggesting that, among
women, household time resources significantly affect the amount
of time allocated to preparing food. In fact, working full-time
and being a single parent appear to affect the time allocated
to preparing food more than an individual’s earnings or
household income do.
Estimates of the time needed to follow recipes from the TFP
range from 80 minutes a day to 16 hours a week. We find that
many low-income households—those with two adults or those
headed by a single parent that works less than 35 hours a week—allocate
enough time for food preparation. However, our estimates also
say that low-income women who work full-time spend just over
40 minutes per day and thus may have difficulties meeting the
past plan’s implied time requirements.
How Was the Project Conducted?
We use 2003-04 data from the American Time Use Survey and multivariate
analysis to explore how time allocated to preparing food differs
between low-income and higher income households. A household
is defined as low-income if total income equals 130 percent
of the poverty line or less. We also run separate estimates
based on gender and whether an individual works full-time (more
than 35 hours in week), part-time (less than 35 hours a week,
but in the labor force), or is not employed. The dependent variable,
time spent in food preparation, is the total minutes in a day
spent in the following four activities:
• Preparing food and drinks, which includes cooking and
in any way getting food and drink ready for consumption.
• Serving food and drinks, which includes activities like
setting the table.
• Food and kitchen cleanup.
• Storing or putting away food and drinks.
We use a Tobit model because food preparation time in a single
day is zero for many individuals. To account for the sample
design, we use sampling weights to obtain representative parameter
estimates and specify strata and clustering variables to increase
their efficiency.
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