And a Meat Loaf to Go; American families want to eat together, they just don't want to cook. No wonder the kitchen is always so clean.(Column)

Byline: Jerry Adler, With Julie Scelfo in New York, Karen Springen in Chicago, Joan Raymond in Cleveland, Tara Weingarten in Los Angeles, Jason McLure in Boston and Karen Breslau in San Francisco

By the hundreds, the cook-books roll off the presses--diet cookbooks and dessert cookbooks; cookbooks for the cuisines of Sri Lanka, South Africa and Canada; berry cookbooks, cherry cookbooks and a cookbook for people with the unusual problem of what to do with a lemon. And then there are racks full of cooking magazines, newspaper recipe columns and even a TV network for people who need to know how to fillet a sea bass at 3 a.m. That is, people like Karen and Ken Mullin, a young professional couple in Cleveland, who subscribe to three cooking magazines and have two fully equipped kitchens in their house. And all so that on their way home from work they can stop off at a supermarket and boldly choose... two portions of meat loaf and a container of mashed potatoes. "My job," says Karen, "is to pour the salad from the bag."

A half-century after the first TV dinner was born, the food industry is approaching its long-sought dream of supplanting the unpaid labor of people like the Mullins in the final, and arguably most profitable, step by which a cow gets turned into meat loaf. Increasingly the acres of Corian countertop in America's Versailles-quality kitchens are used not for chopping or whisking but for dumping takeout containers onto plates. For those who even bother with plates. According to the influential food-industry researchers at the NPD Group, the proportion of American dinners that came from a takeout counter or a grocery freezer increased by 24 percent in the past decade. "We thought the microwave would be a cooking appliance," says NPD vice president Harry Balzer; instead it found its apotheosis in reheating takeout macaroni and cheese.

Across the United States, entire business models are being transformed. Supermarket takeout counters, formerly a place where unsold chickens were rejuvenated with a coat of barbecue sauce, increasingly resemble high-end corporate cafeterias, with sushi bars and stir-fry stations and cooked-to-order pizza ovens. And in the restaurant business, Balzer ...