I have never put a cleanup number on a recipe card. The card counts the prep and most of the cooking, and then it usually stops at the moment the food reaches the table, which is a reasonable place for a recipe to stop and is one reason a thirty-minute dinner has never felt like thirty minutes to me.
There is a bigger measure of what feeding people costs, and it comes from the American Time Use Survey, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics sponsors and the Census Bureau carries out by telephone, and which has been running since 2003. Interviewers walk people through the previous day one activity at a time, asking what came next and how long it took, instead of asking how much time anybody thinks they usually spend. Four researchers pulled every year from 2003 through 2023, analyzed 231,657 responses, and published the results in Current Developments in Nutrition in August 2025. They left 2020 out of the year-by-year trends, because COVID disrupted the interviewing itself. Among adults who did any cooking on a given day, the mean was 63 minutes in 2003 and 62 minutes in 2023, a difference the paper calculates from unrounded values, puts at zero, and reports as not statistically significant (P = 0.849).
Read that number carefully, because it is not one dinner. It is an average across everything people did with food in a whole day.
What the government counts that a recipe card does not
The category the researchers used is the survey’s bucket for “food and drink preparation, presentation, and clean-up,” and the paper’s examples of what falls inside it include pouring beverages, setting the table, cleaning the kitchen, defrosting food, and pumping breast milk. So the hour spans the work behind breakfast, lunch, the drink somebody asked for at four in the afternoon, and dinner, plus every dish any of it produced. The eating itself is counted somewhere else. Cooking as a job is excluded, and so are meal planning and grocery shopping, which means the hour is not padded out with the thinking part or the store run.
One more rule shapes the number. The survey records only what a person was doing as their main activity at the time, so an hour of chicken sitting in the oven while you fold laundry does not get counted as cooking at all. The authors note that this may push the hour lower than the real figure.
A recipe card mostly measures one dish, from the fridge to the table, because that is close to the only stretch a recipe can honestly claim. The survey measures an average day of feeding people with the dishes included. They are different questions, and neither one is the number you want when you are staring down a single Tuesday night. The authors say as much about their own figures, noting that population averages like these do not necessarily describe any one person’s usual day.
The number that actually surprised me
More people cook now than did twenty years ago. Across all adults, the share who did any cooking on a given day rose from 53 percent in 2003 to 62 percent in 2023, which caught me off guard, because if you had asked me to guess I would have said that number was falling. What did not happen is the part I keep coming back to: all of those extra cooks arrived and the average across everybody who cooked stayed where it was.
The split by sex is where it gets pointed. The share of men who cooked on a given day went from 36 percent in 2003 to 52 percent in 2023, and the authors write that it steadily increased before stabilizing in 2021. Women went from 69 percent to 72 percent, an increase the paper also reports as statistically significant, though it describes that series as oscillating within a 66 to 74 percent band. Then look at the minutes. Men who cooked averaged 45 minutes in 2003 and 50 minutes in 2023, which the paper reports as statistically significant. Women who cooked averaged 71 minutes in both years, with no significant difference between them (P = 0.869), and the paper reports their yearly average running between 67 and 73 minutes across the period. Fit a line through the yearly figures instead of comparing the two ends, and both sexes drift upward, by three tenths of a minute a year for men and one tenth for women. Those upward lines are statistically significant, and the authors still call the increases minimal.
Twenty years, men going from 36 percent to 52 percent, and women who cooked in 2023 averaging the same 71 minutes that women who cooked in 2003 did.
Why I think the hour is stuck
This part is my read and the study does not test it. The shortcuts sitting on the shelf mostly go after the cooking. Jarred sauce, pre-cut squash, frozen chopped onion, bagged salad, rotisserie chicken, a bottle of stir-fry sauce instead of a ten-ingredient list. Several of those take a dish out of the sink too, and bagged salad is the clearest one. What they mostly leave alone is the back half of the job: the plates, the counter, the bowls, and the four surfaces raw chicken managed to reach.
So the thirty-minute recipe probably really did get faster. The day did not.
The number I would put on a recipe card
Still my read, and still not something the study measured: if the hour is prep plus serving plus cleanup, then two things a recipe could tell you would be worth more than the total at the top: how much of it comes back out of the dishwasher, and how much of the time you actually have to stand there, which the prep line gets close to on some cards and nowhere near on others. That is a different filter than the one most of us shop by, and it changes which dinners earn a spot on the rotation. Here is what it looks like on three of mine.
Baked tortellini with meat sauce is built so the pasta step disappears. The tortellini goes into the dish uncooked and softens in the sauce while it bakes, so there is no pot of boiling water and no colander, and it feeds six in fifty minutes. What comes back out of the dishwasher is a skillet for the beef, the 9×13 dish, and the cups, spoons, and stirring tools that any recipe with a seasoning list is going to cost you.
Sheet pan General Tso’s chicken is thirty minutes for eight servings, and the card has you line the pan first, so with parchment or foil the sheet pan itself never hits the sink. The rest is honest work: a bowl to toss the chicken with the sauce, a spatula or a pair of tongs for the flip halfway through and the toss at the end, the cups and spoons you measured with, plus a board and a knife unless you buy the peppers, the green onions, and the broccoli already cut. Then there is the rice, which my own card lists as two cups of steamed white rice and tells you to serve the chicken over, without a step for cooking it, one of the thirty minutes allowed for it, or any mention of the pot it comes out of.
Slow cooker pulled chicken is the odd one here, because the dish count is not what makes it easy. It wins on attention. The card says four hours and fifteen minutes, and the front end is about fifteen of them: you whisk the sauce in a medium bowl, pour it over two pounds of chicken breasts, put the lid on, and leave it on low. The survey would not count those four hours either, since nobody is standing there. It is the card of the three where the printed total runs furthest ahead of the work you have to be there for, four hours and fifteen minutes against a fifteen minute prep line plus the shredding at the end. Even so, the clock holds something back, because the ten to fifteen minutes of thickening if the sauce is thin and the extra half hour if the chicken is not tender both sit outside the four fifteen. At the end you shred it with two forks right in the crock, which you are washing either way, and if you make the optional coleslaw you have added a large bowl and a second round with the whisk.
What to do with this
Count the dishes yourself before you commit. Read the recipe through once and add up the pans, the bowls, the boards, and the tools that have to come back out of the dishwasher, because I think that count, together with how much of the time you actually have to stand there, tells you more about your night than the total at the top of the page does.
And when the evening runs long, it helps to know what the rest of the country is doing. About six out of ten adults cooked on a given day in 2023, up from about five in ten in 2003, and the ones who cooked averaged right around an hour of food work across the whole day. That is the same hour cooks averaged twenty years ago. My own bet is that the part that got the least attention is the washing up.
By Sara Nelson, Creator of Real Balanced.
Dining and Cooking