Restaurant food has a major convenience factor, but the NYTimes article completely disregards that it also just plain tastes better than a salad to most people.
As someone who hates healthy food, lives in NYC where I can literally order delivery off the internet, and is trying to cook a lot more, you can't force two things on people at once: healthy eating AND cooking. I'm beginning to really like cooking, but only because I'm making things that aren't super healthy. My mother is a librarian and highly encourages her kids to read comics because to her they are a) totally valid reading material and b) are sometimes a gateway drug to much more reading. It's the same with cooking: teach someone to cook a butter burger and fry up some potatoes first (they'll still probably be knocking a few hundred calories off a restaurant version of the same meal anyway) and get them hooked on it. Maybe they'll transition to healthier stuff, worst case you at least have them eating SLIGHTLY healthier, and far closer to the source.
TLDR: Make a man a salad and he will order delivery for a night, teach a man to make salad and he will order deliver for a lifetime.
"Healthy" just means that the food is beneficial and doesn't harm you. To know with some real certainty that something is or isn't harmful you have to run your own tests: The effects of sesame oil vs. olive oil, more butter vs. more sugar, etc. Given the speed at which dietary guidelines change, the facts and hard rules should be given less weight than your own feelings and behavior post-consumption.
Take the same item prepared at home or "commercially" (either in a package or at a restaurant) and the home version is apt to be healthier, because you have to go out of your way to make it as unhealthy as the commercial version will have been made so that it sells better. The most obvious example is that you're much less likely to deep fry something at home, but you're also less likely to spike your salad dressing with corn syrup.
I should also point out that we lived in a small organic farm, giving me the advantage of an abundant source of vegetables, fruits, eggs and dairy.
Half a teaspoon of dijon mustard (the dark stuff, not the yellow squeezy hotdog stuff)
Half teaspoon of mayonaise
Teaspoon of olive oil
Teaspoon of lemon juice
Shake and pour on lettuce
You have olive oil, lemon juice, and dijon. All you need is an egg yolk and you have Caesar salad, not "sort of ceaser salad [made with mayo]".
1 egg yolk, 2 tbs lemon juice (or, just half a lemon's juice), spoon of dijon, dash worcestershire (if you have it handy), crushed garlic clove (if you have it handy). Salt, pepper. Mix mix mix mix. 1/3 cup olive oil, poured slowly while mix mix mix mix mix. CAESAR SALAD.
Every time you put mayo in a Caesar, God staple-guns a kitten to a sheet of rotted plywood by the ears. I have this on very good authority.
Same here. Mom couldn't afford much convenience food, so I learned to go to the butcher down the street -- 25 years ago in Brooklyn, NY there were still neighborhood butchers. Wonder if they're still there -- and get chicken/ground beef/etc, season it and either cook it following her instructions or wait until she came home to finish the meal. Learning basic cooking techniques from an early age (I started baking around age 9 and I'm bringing my son up the same way) means they became second nature without me even realizing it. I think it's that automatic response that is most important to learn; "I'm hungry" means I start thinking about what ingredients are on hand that I can cook quickly, not what boxed meal I can microwave.
I still remember being amazed post-college at how helpless my roommate was (Burger King every night or detailed instructions from his gf on how to make cinnamon sugar toast!).
Trust me, as they each grow older, they will appreciate your cooking more and more. I myself was a hamburgers, hotdogs, chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese kid growing up, but going home to my parents to eat Mom's cooking is priceless now.
I used to bake bread in my dorm kitchen. My floormates thought it astounding. This is how I learned that nobody's parents had taught them how to cook. As an only child of a single parent, the responsibility for the evening meal fell to me (as well as my own meals throughout the day). Eventually I set upon the family collection of cookbooks and was allowed to make pretty much anything. Even a recipe from a Campbell's Soup cookbook for oatmeal cookies containing a can of tomato soup (as disgusting as it sounds).
Perhaps it's worth noting that my kids generally prefer prepackaged foods over our cooking. So maybe it's a cyclical thing, in some subset of each generation. But I'm hoping that teaching them to cook will change that.