Zinczenko - Eat this, not that!: the best (& worst) foods in America

The time it takes to go from Id like a hamburger to That was a delicious hamburger has shrunk exponentially from the time of our great-grandparents, who had to tramp through snow to the butcher shop, lug home a pound of chuck, grind it, and fry it up themselves. Even our own parents, back in the dark ages of the last millennium, had to rummage around for a menu, make a phone call (from their house!), and then wait 40 minutes for dinner to show up. Today, you can accidentally butt dial a burger from your GrubHub app. Problem solved! But one persons paradise is anothers purgatory, and all the super-convenient food delivery apps and restaurant reservation sites and proliferating juice and smoothie barswhere food is reduced to the most quickly consumed form possiblehave only served to speed the race of calories into our bodies. I envy Great-Grandma and the muscles she built grinding that chuck steak and chopping those vegetables. Consider this: When I wrote the Eat This Not That! Restaurant Survival Guide, in 2010, I reported on how Americans were getting 33 percent of their calories from outside the homeup from less than 20 percent in the 1980s. Consider this: When I wrote the Eat This Not That! Restaurant Survival Guide, in 2010, I reported on how Americans were getting 33 percent of their calories from outside the homeup from less than 20 percent in the 1980s.

And its not just because were spending more time in restaurants. The Great Recession changed the way we eat. When everyone was too worried about the future to book that trip to the Bahamas, we instead looked to little indulgences to feed our passions. And one of the places we indulged ourselves was food. Look at how our food is behaving differently.

Eating indulgent food, eating more local, and eating on the goespecially when lunch hours are squeezed and bosses are angstyare three trends that coalesce around the idling food truck. Americas 3,900 food trucks take in $804 million in revenue, but some analysts see this as a $2.7 billion industry within the decade.

Only 57 percent of seniors did the same. As our cooking skills erode, so too does our ability to control exactly what it is were eating.