In Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, Michael Pollan asks, What is wrong with this picture?

Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.

While they love his ode to Julia Child, in not quite unison, feminists are far less enamored of this take on Betty Friedan:

Curiously, the year Julia Child went on the air — 1963 — was the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.

Amanda Marcotte’s “boundless enthusiasm for Michael Pollan’s body of work” has subsided. And Kate Harding writes in Salon’s Broadsheet:

Pollan takes pains to assure us that the large number of women now working outside the home is only partially responsible for this trend, and that he’s not calling for women to get back into the kitchen or anything. He’s calling for everybody to get back into the kitchen — or at least one cook in every household, and if that happens to be the woman, well, he didn’t make the rules! To be fair, Pollan would probably not be such a fierce advocate for home cooking if he didn’t enjoy it himself, but I still can’t help thinking his penis is showing when he describes Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” — which also debuted in 1963 — as “the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.” Funny, I always thought Friedan became a feminist icon because she articulated what millions of women already felt, not because she brainwashed them into believing that repetitive, menial, unpaid labor might not be the best use of their talents.

Child, argues Pollan, demonstrated that “cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention. (A man’s, too.)” And even Simone de Beauvoir said whipping up pastries could involve “revelation and creation” — a statement Pollan characterizes as “a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.” Oh, those thoughtless feminists! I wasn’t around in the ’60s, but I’m guessing they made ridiculous, man-hating arguments like, “Dude, Julia Child gets paid to cook.”

The thrust of Pollan’s piece is to take on the food-as-spectator-sport attitude of the new television cooking genre and — much as he tried to do with his piece on gardens — move us toward an appreciation of cooking from scratch.

If not the catalyst, at least a hook for Pollan’s piece is the opening this weekend of Julie & Julia. This latest from Nora Ephron stars Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as blogger Julie Powell chronicling her attempt to cook all the recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking for her 2005 book Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.

The LATimes’ John Horn profiles Ephron on the making of the film. Melissa Silverstein says it’s “the one movie that women have been waiting for all summer,” noting the slim competition (GI Joe). I’m imagining Pollan would not be amused to learn that on the silver screen the move has been toward not just real food, but hyper-real:

“Everybody thinks it’s all shellacked,” said Colin Flynn, a New York-based chef and stylist who worked with Ms. Spungen on the film. “In the ’70s and ’80s it was more like that. Food looked more like Plasticine. Nowadays it’s almost always real food.”

For food stylists, most of whom began as cooks, it’s a welcome change. It’s also good for audiences, who have become more sophisticated about food and expect more realistic images. And directors believe that well-prepared food can improve the actors’ performances and the look of the final scene.

“The challenge always is making it seem delicious and hyper-real,” said John Lyons, president of production for Focus Features. “If it doesn’t look hyper-real, it doesn’t work in the movie.”

RELATED: The feminists aren’t Pollan’s only critics. Reason’s Ronald Bailey points to The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals in which, he says, “real farmers” Rip Michael Pollan and the Me-Too Gaggle of Food Elitists A New One. I am happy to read push-back from The Big Money’s Dan Mitchell:

What is disheartening here is that Hurst makes some good points under all the confrontational bluster. Proponents of “sustainable” agriculture do tend to downplay the often painful, often expensive tradeoffs that must be made. “Biotech crops actually cut the use of chemicals, and increase food safety,” Hurst writes. True. But he follows that up with: “Are people who refuse to use them my moral superiors?” Not true.

To reach the difficult compromises that must be made between industrial and organic farming, it’s probably best to avoid the resentments and the Us vs. Them mentality. And to avoid mischaracterizing your critics and seeing them as mortal enemies.