Someone recently shocked me by putting pancake mix on a list of breakfast-making requirements.

Pancake mix, cookie mix, prepared pie crusts, cake mix, and suchlike sadden me. Making these items from mixes takes about the same level of effort as making them from scratch.

Two examples:

• Pancakes: Two cups flour, two tablespoons sugar, 2 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon baking soda, ½ teaspoon salt. (To which, just as you do with a mix, you add egg and milk.)

• Pie crust (double): Two cups flour, one teaspoon sugar, one teaspoon salt, two sticks of butter, and a little iced water.

These recipe components are kitchen staples. Most pantries have them. In fact, yours might have had them the last time you bought a mix from the store—and at a significant markup over the individual ingredients.

If your pantry lacks these staples, buy them. Don't buy mixes and foods preprepared for baking.

Let's be clear: I'm not against buying prepared foods. Foods are always easier to buy than to purchase. If you'd rather not go to the effort, buy it already made. I do so regularly. However, in these cases, I buy the fully prepared item—not a mix that takes just as much effort to cook as starting from scratch. (And, sorry, buying an unbaked pie crust is just silly.)

Who should we blame (or credit) for our current ignorance of cooking basics?

• Should we blame people for blindly heeding advertising's claims about the "ease" of mixes--never bothering to look into how unnecessary they are?

• Should we credit consumer-products companies for tricking the world into purchasing marked-up basic kitchen ingredients?

• Should we blame a society that doesn't pass on even the basics of cooking to upcoming generations?

Or does it not matter? People who use mixes fuel commerce—if they're willing to pay a premium for flour, sugar, and salt and help a company's revenue in the process, why should anyone talk them out of it?

But I can still feel a tinge of melancholy that most people haven't had truly homemade apple pie and that people believe chocolate chip cookies are so hard to make that they never enjoy a from-scratch batch. (These are American icons!) Home-cooked food is a simple pleasure.

Think you need a mix? Think again.