For most of history, you had to cook if you wanted to eat. But cultures that once had traditions of spending full days in the kitchen, like Italy or India, are beginning to change. Fast food and microwaves are beginning to replace the beautiful cooking processes of our past.

How did we get here? The answer is more important than you might realize.

In India, for example, pot cooking has always been the dominant form of cooking. Walk down a street in Mumbai and sidewalk chefs are bending over large back pots that look like cauldrons, stirring a magical mixture of spices and herbs. And that way of eating has always been a part of their daily ritual.

When girls were young, their mothers brought them into the kitchen so they could learn the intricacies of cooking Indian food. They didn’t take shortcuts–they ground the spices themselves, they made their own coconut milk. They learned to cook traditional and healthy food for their families that were high in nutrition and medicinal value. It takes a great amount of skill to bring all those tastes and ingredients together–a lifetime of skill passed from one generation to the next. And it wasn’t just about filling stomachs: the foods they cooked kept them healthy, too. But this kind of cooking takes time. And that’s something we don’t seem to have much of anymore. Is the idea of a grandma taking humble ingredients and her lifetime of cooking skills and making it into something delicious and sustaining a thing of the past?

According to food writer Michael Pollan, time is the missing ingredient in our recipes and in our lives. Most of us are moving too fast for slow cooking. For years, Americans have been putting in longer hours at work. When both adults in a household are working outside the home, there simply isn’t time to work up magical food in the kitchen. And so what do we do? We look for shortcuts. Americans actually spend less time cooking than any other nation.

We’re happy someone else is doing our cooking, whether it’s a convenience store, a grocery store or a fast food restaurant. The problems is, how can we continue to eat wholesome food in such a world?

People are also working more in India. They have the same problems with time. But what they’ve done is figured out a way to get home cooked food to people at work by having it delivered to them from someone’s kitchen. And while that works for an older workforce, the younger people are beginning to turn to the array of American fast food restaurants that have snuck into their neighborhoods. Also, the market for convenient, overly-processed foods like potato chips has grown enormously and are now widely available in Indian markets.

Consumption of the stuff is up 10 percent in Indian urban areas. Television markets to the younger generation, showing attractive, sporty young people drinking Coke and Sprite. These food companies are working overtime to get the people of India addicted to the salty and sugary tastes of fast food. It’s a huge market: 1.4 billion people. Corporate food companies are licking their lips, waiting for the Indians to put down their tiki masala and eat a burger and fries or a chicken nugget.

I detest this kind of cultural expansion that does nothing but sicken once healthy countries of the world. But what I am proposing today is a winter of nutrition for you–a real focus on spending time in the kitchen and feeding your families delicious and substantive food.

And the way to do that is by making time for it, even if it means spending all day Sunday preparing a few meals for the upcoming week. Let’s make some lasagna, some beef stew, or homemade pizza. Let’s remember chicken cutlets done right, fat fettuccini noodles dressed in cream, salads with real vinaigrette.

Buy the best high-quality ingredients you can afford and make yourself something. And cook it as simply as possible. Invite the kids in to help, because if we’re ever going to rebuild a culture of cooking, we need to bring our kids back into the kitchen.

We’re losing knowledge, us humans–the knowledge of how to cook, those special recipes from long-gone relatives, the ancient processes of making real food. That’s not a good thing, but we can embrace true cooking again by simply caring about what we’re eating and making time to do better.