This week, McDonald’s announced that worldwide growth at restaurants open at least 13 months was at is highest level in 17 years. Sales in these stores swelled a whopping 5.1 % in the last quarter.

Obviously, the success of the indie documentary “Super Size Me” – just nominated for an Academy Award – chronicling filmmaker Morgan Spurlock’s month-long anti-diet of McDonald’s offerings didn’t dull the world’s appetite for fries and burgers. But this week the fast-food giant also set aside new reserves for legal charges. A spokesman for the company was mum about whether or not these reserves had anything to do with the green light given to a lawsuit by two teens in New York alleging that McDonald’s violated the New York Consumer Protection Act in one of several “obesity” lawsuits.

Frankly, McDonald’s success is upsetting. It’s not the fat, alone. It’s the fact that we as a fast food nation cook less and less. According to the latest report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the bottom quintile of American’s wage earners ate one-quarter of their meals out of the home. The top quintile was even less hearth-bound: top earners ate one-third of their meals out.

Fast food is just one more example of the domestic outsourcing that is a very real problem with the way we live now. Now that last year’s election-triggered brouhaha over offshore outsourcing has quieted down somewhat, I think it is time to discuss the value of taking care of each other, ourselves, in our own homes.

Are we paying other people to perform too many of the activities that knit families together?

When I was in college, many years ago, feminists would talk about the need for communal kitchens where meals would be served to relieve women of the burden of cooking so that they could be lawyers, say, or even doctors. Well, it looks like McDonald’s and other chains have done just that.

And then there are the dog walkers. Vans with names like “Puppy Love” shuttle through city and suburban streets, driven by professionals who are paid to play fetch. Where are the kids who wanted the dog in the first place? Most likely they are engaged in some activity, costing plenty, paid for by the parents who are working overtime to cover the ever-expanding pile of bills.

Digital cameras are a godsend to those of us with shoeboxes full of family photos. But there is a solution for those guilt-inducing, yellowing remembrances of things past. Even photo albums can be outsourced – for $75 an hour, professionals will come into your home and help you organize your memories. It would be wonderful to have a bookshelf full of neatly numbered and captioned albums. But the process of sorting through the hundreds of snapshots of the new baby, puppy, or kindergarten sing-along might be one best shared with family or friends with a high tolerance for nostalgia.

A friend of mine told me about a recent eulogy she’d heard, given by a well-known woman writer. The writer had said that she had spent the last 47 years tending to the happiness of her husband. If it weren’t for this woman’s books, speeches, and journalism it might sound like she had given up her own life for that of her husband. In fact, she had used the word “tended.” It’s hard to imagine that most of what she did was bought.

Paying others to do for our own, be it a dollar for a double cheeseburger or $75 for an hour session with a photo album paraprofessional, should have its limits.

It can even be educational to eat at home.

According to the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, studies show that one of the single greatest predictors for high SAT scores is eating a family meal and spending time chatting as a family unit. Families who ate together at least one night a week reported that their teens did better on that middle class bete noire of standardized testing than those families that did not share a meal.

Big Macs can be cheaper than a home-cooked meal. On the other hand, it’s cheaper to eat together, at home, than pay for an SAT prep course.

Ms. Bailey is a business writer and family therapist. She is working on a book on families and money.