According to research by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 1920 the average American woman spent 30 hours per week preparing meals and cleaning up from them. By 1950, the number of hours per week women spent rustling up chow dropped to 20 hours per week. Today, American women spend, on average, 5.5 hours per week cooking and cleaning up, and the prepared food industry has grown to into a billion dollar behemoth. American men, you ask? How much time do they spend each week slaving over a hot microwave, and boiling bags of sauce? American men spend fifteen minutes, on average, per day cooking and cleaning up, according to a piece published in the May 2011 issue of The Atlantic. Writer Megan McArdle’s piece is titled, “The Joy of Not Cooking.”

Her essay is a look at why kitchens are becoming increasingly expensive temples to extortionately priced countertops, appliances, back splashes and flooring, while the amount of time spent chopping on the countertops, cooking on the appliances, cleaning the back splashes and walking across the flooring continues to diminish.

Why are we spending more on kitchens we use less and less? One answer? Men have trophy cars and trophy wives, and women have trophy kitchens.

This is from a listing for a local Ann Arbor home priced to move at $595,000: “Quintessential College Hills home in pristine condition. Charming architectural detail. Gleaming hardwood floors throughout. Freshly painted inside & out by Ken Lussenden. Newer mechanicals. Updated kitchen with Wood-Mode cabinets, granite counters & high-end appliances. First floor master suite. Three bedrooms and study on second floor. Home is in move-in condition and minutes to the U. of M. campus & hospital.”

Here’s another listing for a home on the same College Hills street, priced a bit more reasonably at  $577,500: “Delightful marriage of yesteryear charms & state of the art function in lovely Ann Arbor Hills “Hickory Hurst Cottage”. Custom kitchen designed for a serious cook w/ hi-end appliances, granite, breakfast bar/island, Motawi tile backsplash. Hardwood floors & Pewabic-tiled fireplace grace the expansive, T-shaped living room. Family room w/ built in bookcases. Romantic owner’s suite w/tile fireplace & sitting area. Newer roof, ext. & int. painting.”

Did you catch the descriptions of the kitchens? In both listings, we have “high-end appliances” and “granite.” Everything a woman who spends 5.5 hours per week cooking could ever need, and certainly more than a man who spends one-quarter of an hour (making toast, maybe?) daily marveling over his “high-end appliances” and, perhaps, wondering how to use them, might ever want.

Do you have these in your kitchen?

Food processor?

Kitchen Aid mixer?

Japanese chefs knives?

$250 Breville toaster oven?

How often do you use them? Daily? Weekly? Holidays? The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle writes:

The obvious, embarrassing conclusion is that we foodies are snobs: the potato masher costs $10 at Target, while the knife costs $199 and comes with its own wooden display stand. Not that I purchased this knife to impress people (she said defensively); it was a wedding gift, like the other Shun knives my husband and I own. When we returned from the honeymoon, we had to tap Shun again, for a 22-slot knife block that could hold all our booty. We now have enough high-end cutlery to stock a small restaurant—and a sense of shame at how rarely we use any of it.

Perhaps you have a Williams-Sonoma catalog somewhere handy in case you need to buy a $20 whisk instead of a $4 whisk from the grocery store? Cookery porn like the Williams-Sonoma catalog, is as much a staple of the “high-end” appliance and “granite” crowd as it is a staple of the laminate counter-top set.

On April 11, 2011 SmartMoney magazine published a feature about the $12.6 billion dollar kitchen renovation industry. Despite the worst economy is 70 years, Americans continue to spend on their kitchens, while using those same kitchens just 1/5th of the time as did women 70 years ago:

Whether they cook like Mario Batali or order nightly takeout, Americans invest in their kitchens. Even at the low point of the downturn, in 2009, homeowners spent an average of $27,300 on kitchen remodels, only an 8 percent drop from the peak of the boom, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Here’s a thought. Perhaps Americans are plowing more and more money into their kitchens because they’re spending less and less time in them. Cooking has gone from a domestic chore to a leisure sport. Think middle-aged men stuffed into spandex and pedaling down the side of the road on racing bikes that cost as much as used cars, wanna-be bad ass Lance Armstrong types, only older. These guys aren’t interested in cycling 10 hours a day. They want to dress like Lance, and have bikes that cost $500 per pound.

So are you Alice Waters cooking up your latest batch of found food (the new organic), or Nigella Lawson? Mario Batali or Jamie Oliver? It’s a kitchen fantasy, after all, and you get to be the star. Megan McArdle writes:

Leisure is as much about our pleasant fantasies as it is about what we’re actually doing. If you see cooking as an often boring part of your daily work, you’ll buy the pots you need to finish the job, and then stop. But if it’s part of a voyage of personal “rediscovery,” you’ll never stop finding new side trips to take—and everyone who’s been on a nice vacation knows the guilty pleasure of spending a little more than you should.

So go ahead, get the six-burner Viking stove, indulge yourself. You’re worth it. Cooking isn’t a chore; it’s a fantasy acted out 5.5 hours each week by American women and about 1 hour per week by American men. “High-end” appliances and “granite,” have become fetishisms, and “cooking” a classic case of  word sense disambiguation.