Americans have a "national eating disorder," according to Michael Pollan. His new book The Omnivore's Dilemma depicts a nation bursting at the seams with corn-based by-products, but starved for real food.

"What can we do about this?" several people plaintively asked Pollan after hearing him elaborate on the sorry state of our nation's food supply at a recent reading.

"People have got to start cooking again," Pollan said, emphatically.

We're tuning in to Bobby Flay and Rachel Ray, and spending the kind of money on kitchen renovations that used to get you a whole house.

But there's not a whole lot of cookin' goin' on, according to Miriam Weinstein, author of The Surprising Power of Family Meals: How Eating Together Makes Us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier, and Happier.

"We got the news about people wanting to eat food that tastes good," Weinstein observes. "But...we missed the memo about the pleasures of making it and eating it and sharing it with people we care about."

Some of us are too busy to cook, or regard cooking as an "irksome chore". As a result, says Weinstein, "Family supper is one more quaint artifact, like vinyl records or manual typewriters." We've raised a whole generation of kids who excel at reheating but can't actually cook.

John Finn, who teaches a course called Culture and Cuisine at Wesleyan University, says of his students, "The vast majority don't have any real cooking skills. They have no sense of how recipes get handed down from generation to generation, of how families, and cultures, are connected by food over time..."

Families have been sitting down together to share a meal at the end of the day for centuries. In other countries, dining together is still a cherished ritual, a time to relax and reconnect with loved ones.

Weinstein recalls a French family she stayed with in Paris as a young woman. Both parents worked, but "work ended promptly at five, with evenings sacred to family and friends." The mother would shop for fresh meats, produce and bread on her way home and, with a bit of help, prepared a "superfresh and tasty" meal they all sat down to savor by seven.

But who gets to go home at 5 o'clock? We proclaim our support for "family values," but at the end of the day, literally, those who leave at five on the dot to get home and get cooking are more likely to raise eyebrows than get any praise, or a raise. Feed your family, or please your boss.

Compound this anti-family dynamic with a long commute, and you're lucky to be home by 8 o'clock.

And yet, people keep moving further and further out to the newly paved exurbs, convinced that what their family really needs is space, and lots of it.

Take Ron and Maxine Thomas. CNN'S Bob Franken interviewed the couple the other day in front of the sprawling 5,300 square foot house they leave each morning at 5:00 to take a 90 minute train ride to their government jobs in Washington, D.C.

The Thomases had looked at homes closer to work, but, according to Ron Thomas, "There was plenty of houses you could get, you know, but not this house. You could get a three bedroom with maybe 2,000 square feet and it was still very expensive."

But the hours spent commuting have their price, too. Maxine Thomas told Franken, "You have to stay up and run errands and do sports and whatever they need to do. So you're in bed by 10:30, 11:00 and then you're up at 3:00. It's exhausting.

Does giving your kids a home with a big backyard, a "great room" and a two-story-high foyer compensate for having no time together just to hang out and catch up on what's going on in each other's lives? Weinstein doesn't think so.

When parents take the time to prepare decent meals, the payoff goes way beyond better nutrition. Weinstein cites numerous studies showing that kids who eat dinner with their parents on a regular basis are more well-adjusted, get better grades, and are far less likely to dabble in substance abuse or other risky behaviors.

A Harvard study found that having dinner together does far more to build your child's vocabulary than reading to him or her. And having a large vocabulary is the key to better reading comprehension, according to Catherine Snow, a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

"We found vocabulary at kindergarten was a very good predictor of reading comprehension throughout the rest of their lives." Snow adds, "Kids who are poor readers nowadays aren't going to get high school diplomas."

In the era of No Child Left Behind, we've left our children to reheat leftovers while we work late and dash around town doing errands. But there are a few brave souls just saying no to long hours at the office and dinners cut short by soccer practice. Weinstein profiles a grassroots group called Putting Family First, whose goal is to help parents rediscover the rewards of a shared family meal and unstructured playtime for kids.

At least a few of us are ready to stop eating on the fly, standing up, or in our cars. And someday, our kids will thank us, maybe even with a tuna noodle casserole or a banana cream pie.