Oddly emough, there was an article somewhere - maybe the Miami Herald, I'm not sure - that says it's not just men who aren't interested in cooking, it's women who don't really care much about the kitchen either. The crux of the matter is that when prepared foods (and I'm including canned foods and frozen dinners here, not just fast food joints or restaurant food) became really dominant, the amount of time spent by either gender went from four hours a day to roughly one or even less. This meant that (a) no one really bothered to learn much about cooking and (b) the nation's obesity rate went up because all that prepared food is full of unhealthy ingredients and for so many years it just seemed cheaper to go out to eat rather than "slave over" a hot stove and cooking.

As for the male-female gender issue you raised, I think that if a man's parents don't teach him to appreciate the fine art of cooking and dispel the notion that it's a "girl's" task (or a sissy one), he will not have a more active role in the kitchen. It's really that simple. I've known lots of guys who learned to cook, some of them quite well, because they weren't "programmed" to think that meal preparation is essentially a feminine activity. (I also must stress that at least one of them, my mom's brother, was once a restaurant owner and a caterer.)