This morning after breakfast my husband took time to just stand around for a bit watching me work in the kitchen. Usually after he helps with breakfast clean-up and wipes the dishes I've washed to clear the sink for further work, he pops down to his workshop to continue whatever his most recent project happens to be.

Friday morning is busy. We usually have hot cereal, and since we each like different types that means two pots of cereal on the stove. I also start to put together a chicken soup that will simmer pretty well all day. And today I prepared a blueberry filling for a pie; since I do that with the use of a frozen pouch of blueberries; they're combined with sugar and cornstarch and a very small amount of cranberry juice to produce a thick, rather than a thin and runny filling, always the case without this pre-preparation.

My husband watched as I put together the ingredients for the pie shell; flour, salt, Crisco shortening, lemon juice and a smidgen of cold water. Watched as I rolled out the bottom and top crusts, filling the pie with the blueberries and snuggling the finished product into the counter-top convection oven. That's for our Friday-night dessert. Our family tradition consists of a baked dessert of some kind to accompany our Friday-night meal.

He was more absorbed than I was in what I was doing; for me it was automatic, the result of decades of food preparation. For him, every movement I made in combining ingredients and handling the results was as mysterious and perhaps enviously impressive as the way I feel watching as he casually goes about doing all the electrical, mechanical, artistic things that he excels at.

We are enabled to do all these things, ironically, through the advent of modern technology which for the food side means the preservation of perishable foods and their transport long distances making available ordinarily out-of-season produce, or produce not grown in our geographic area, but made available to us nonetheless. And the tools required to make our jobs, whether it be plumbing, electrical or food preparation, more expeditious.

The irony lies in the unequivocal reality that there are fewer people who will take the scarce time allotted them in their busy lifestyles to do these things, choosing alternately to avail themselves of pre-processed foods of inferior quality and nutrition which the food manufacturers make more palatable by the disproportional addition of salt, sugar and fat, the ingredients most attractive to the human tongue.