Cooking and caring for children are both essentially and distinctively human—we couldn’t survive as a species without them. But the more we intentionally and deliberately cook and eat in order to become healthy, or raise children in order to make them happy and successful adults, the less healthy and happy we and our children seem to become. The preponderance of parenting books, like the preponderance of diet books, should, just by itself, be a sign of their futility; if any of them actually worked, that success ought to put the rest of them out of business.
