The Weight of Responsibilities: Time in Responsibilities and in Food Preparation

The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans emphasize whole, minimally processed foods. However, the time required to prepare these foods may present a barrier. There is limited research on how other responsibilities shape food preparation activities.

The objective of this study was to identify the daily life activities that adults in the United States consider responsibilities and evaluate the association between the amount of time spent on responsibilities and food preparation activities.

Using data from a national survey among United States adults, we identified which activities adults consider responsibilities. We used the American Time Use Survey and the Eating and Health Module data from 2014-2016 and 2022-2023 to examine the relationship between time spent on responsibilities and food preparation in the pooled sample and stratified by household composition.

Households with children spent the most time in responsibilities and food preparation, with single-parent households spending less time in food preparation than dual-parent households. The estimated association between time in responsibilities and food preparation was small but significant and negative in the pooled sample and across household composition subgroups.

The marginal association between responsibilities and food preparation time is small, suggesting that households largely protect food preparation time as responsibilities increase. However, cumulative effects across realistic variation in responsibilities are nontrivial (representing ≤9% to 16% of mean food preparation time), and the relative inelasticity itself suggests that many households may already be operating near a minimum feasible level of food preparation time, raising questions about the potential for policies to encourage additional home cooking without simultaneously addressing structural time burdens. The findings provide policy-relevant evidence that time scarcity, beyond individual preferences, is strongly associated with household food preparation decisions, suggesting that it may operate as a meaningful constraint rather than merely reflecting preference differences.