The movie Julie & Julia, due out soon ... or possibly out now for all I know ... has raised a lot of food chatter and contemplation of the state of cooking in American kitchens. Perhaps none has raised hackles more, and for me more unexpectedly, than Michael Pollan's article for The New York Times, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch . It is a long article but well worth it as Pollan considers why we have gone from cooking food to watching others cook it on The Food Network. But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking. That decline has several