The woman's Costco cart was packed, and right on top was a huge box of haupia pudding mix — enough to make pudding for an entire lu'au, I imagine.

I thought about testing recipes recently for haupia from scratch, with the milk of fresh-grated coconuts. Grating the coconut alone probably takes twice as long as making that whole bag of just-add-water pudding.

So who would use my recipe? Who cooks anymore? Who needs to?

As to that last question: Nobody in America.

In a standard supermarket, you can buy food in absolutely every form: raw (but often with "value added," such as pre-cut stir-fry mixes of boneless meat strips and pre-cut vegetables); fully or partly cooked food in every form — vacuum-packed, dehydrated, ready to reheat from the chill case or hot to go.

But once, if nobody in the house cooked, nobody in the house ate.

I can just barely recall when, doing the weekly shopping with my grandmother on Thursdays, we'd have to make several stops: the butcher shop on Wailuku's Market Street, Yokouchi Bakery for Portuguese white bread, and somewhere else for dry goods. By the time I was born, Grandma was able to buy plucked chickens and sliced bread — but she knew how to de-feather a bird if she had do and, in her girlhood, had made bread in a wood-burning oven almost every day.

The vegetable man would bring a cart up Vineyard Street behind our house — I can't remember if he hauled it or drove it, but this was the 1950s, so I doubt it involved a horse! Grandma would walk out with a home-sewn rice-bag sack to buy whatever she hadn't raised in her garden.

Her every day was built around what Robert Frost called, "the doing of work that never stays done" — chiefly, feeding the family three meals a day (Grandpa came home to lunch, I took lunch to school).

Later, I remember the excitement when Ooka's, Wailuku's first supermarket, opened. Everything in one place! How modern! How convenient!

Of course, our idea of convenience was entirely relative.

We bought meat in large cuts. There were bottles, cans and bags in the pantry, but few boxes and no mixes. Our only countertop appliance was a toaster (and later a mixer). The freezer was stuffed with homemade solid-pack tomatoes and meat and fish bartered with family.

When cake mixes were invented, Grandma was ecstatic, especially since Grandpa loved angel food, which involved beating nine egg whites — by hand. If Betty Crocker had actually existed, Grandma would have crowned her queen.

My grandmother's decision to abandon from-scratch baking points in a straight line to the strange culinary world in which we live today.

In this world, people are demonstrably more interested in reading about food, collecting cookbooks and watching chefs prepare meals on TV than they are in cooking their own meals. The children of my friends — mostly grown and having children of their own — don't cook, they'll tell you with a trace of pride, as though it were a troublesome task they had cleverly avoided. They know how to pick up, "prepare according to package directions" and "zap."

But this is not a food whine. I'm a pragmatist. I realize that as one who cooks from scratch every single day, I am a rarity. But, of course, I get paid to cook, and even if I didn't, it happens to be my pleasure — my creative outlet, my solace, my breathing space between work life and home and (when things turn out well) my ego-booster.

It annoys me that the grocery industry has begun to so slavishly cater to noncooks that you have to special-order bone-in meats and go to a health- food store to find anything without added sugar and salt, and that things that used to be "poor food" are now "specialty food" (if Grandma could see the price of salt cod, she'd throw her apron over her head and howl).

But I am no zealot. I happily use convenience foods if they're of good quality, or can be easily "doctored." Right now, for example, I'm all about Bertolli's genuinely good frozen pasta suppers, and those top-and-bake Boboli pizza rounds are a life-saver. A child of the '50s, I even occasionally enjoy boxed stuff that has no redeeming social value other than nostalgia (Kraft Macaroni and Cheese — nasty but strangely satisfying).

A commentator once speculated about when and how, exactly, rice (not native to the Islands) became cheaper and more widely available than poi (pre-contact Hawai'i's staple starch). It's a shrewd observation that brings into focus thorny issues, such as the politics of agriculture. Given that eating is a daily necessity for every living creature, I have similar questions about when and how preparing food fell off the list of things we value — and that, too, introduces thorny historical, political and social questions.

All this makes interesting dinner-party conversation, but I'm realistic about the chances that America will ever again routinely cook from scratch. My personal goals are modest: To encourage people to preserve old foodways and recipes by documenting their elders' memories and recipes. To suggest that eating seasonally and locally is a Very Good Thing — for your health, for local farmers, for the economy and the environment, for tourism, even. To present cooking as a pursuit that can be pleasurable, meditative, soul-satisfying, a way of reconnecting with the earth and with other people — whether you do it every day or only when you have time.

And I am much buoyed up by seeing Islanders making small changes: doing our marketing as Europeans do (in small amounts, just what we can consume in a day or two), buying produce at truly local farmer's markets, trying artisanal foods, choosing more whole foods and reduced-fat products, carrying reusable shopping bags, cooking from scratch a couple of times a week.

If these are still habits most ingrained only in certain socio-economic groups (the well-off, the foodie, the trend-tracker, the health enthusiast), well, that's how movements start.

Send recipes and queries to Wanda A. Adams, Food Editor, Honolulu Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802. Fax: 525-8055. E-mail: wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.

For more information about our 150th anniversary cookbook, call 535-8189 (message phone; your call will be returned). You can order the cookbook online.

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