While cooking at home is no longer an odious chore, many critics lament what they see as the demise of cooking from scratch. These critics promise that a return to the kitchen will make Americans healthier and happier. By claiming that home cooking is in a state of decline from an idealized past and proposing that the only solution to the stress of modern life is a return to those past kitchen practices, these critics adhere to a traditional rhetorical pattern known as a “Jeremiad.” However, the weakness of the American home cooking jeremiad is that it only serves to increase anxiety as Americans fail to capture a past golden age that never really existed.