This Sunday’s New York Times magazine was devoted to the topic of food. It featured an article on a 15-year old boy who is a gourmet chef, twin brothers who have competing microbrew companies, and the food in the restaurants run by celebrity chefs.

As always with style and lifestyle articles in the New York Times, these articles are aimed at the 1 percenters and the Brooklyn crowd. It missed the major stories about food in this country. Most Americans aren’t concerned with the half teaspoon of lemon juice over the bed of roasted beets and flower petals. They aren’t paying $200 for a meal in a restaurant run by Gordon Ramsey. I think we need a conversation about food the rest of us.

For most middle class Americans, the biggest food issue is that they don’t know how to cook and they don’t have time to cook.

In Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, Matthew Crawford talks about the demise of shop class as a school requirement and how people no longer know how to work with their hands. Food has the same problem. They started phasing out home economics classes around the same time as shop classes faded. So, kids go off to college without knowing how to cook a bag of ramen.

Kids aren’t learning from the parents, either, because parents aren’t cooking. Most people don’t know how to slice an onion or how to roast vegetables. I know people who have no idea what to do with a head of garlic or how to wash lettuce.

People aren’t cooking in part, because they don’t know how to do it. But is that a good excuse in the age of YouTube cooking shows and Epicurious? A five-second google search, “how to roast asparagus”, pulls up 10 million results.

The information is there. What’s not there? Time. People are extremely busy with work and parenting and food falls off the daily chore list.

The other food story that wasn’t included in the New York Times magazine is the horrific state of affairs of feeding the poor.