When Will Your Kitchen Disappear?
Live in an apartment?
Own a house?
Spend your entire life on a boat?
On the road in a motor home?
It is almost a certainty that no matter where you live, your home has a kitchen. Whether you are a gourmet chef or are so incapable (or clever) that you can burn the water every time you set foot in a kitchen, no matter where you live, it almost certainly has an area for the preparation and cooking of food.
There are only two areas in a standard modern home that are guaranteed to exist: food preparation area and the indoor toilet and bathroom.
Some day that dedicated kitchen area will disappear.
It is amazing to me how quickly we just assume that something has naturally existed for what seems forever. Indoor toilets were not standard features of homes in the Western world until the latter part of the 19th century, and indoor toilets only came about, and all of the hygiene problems they create, because home builders were installing the new fangled indoor plumbing and dedicating an area of the home to washing up and bathing and indoor plumbing only came about because of the towns installing municipal water supplies.
The dedicated kitchen has of course existed much longer, but even that is a relatively recent introduction to the home. You can still find homes, a few hundred years old, which have no area devoted to food preparation.
With Western society’s move to pre-packaged meals, an ignorance of raw ingredients, easy access to cheap fast food, a propensity for “dining out” coupled with the decline of home cooking and the teaching of it at school, one day, you might be looking at a modern home, recently constructed, that has no kitchen.
I predict the change will start with apartments aimed at middle-class single people and young couples, and this change may even begin to appear in my lifetime.
I raise this point because the concepts of what we consider a house and home, though mostly stable, have shifted over time to our modern thinking and we do not give much thought to the environment we live in. We are a product of our environment. I developed an interest in cooking because of a) my parents’ past occupations and b) having access to an amazing kitchen in a house I was renting many years ago.
As a product of the environment, we’re all pushed and manipulated without actually realising it. Becoming aware of that environment lets you change who you are in ways that are not immediately obvious.
And if you live in a modern home, I can also bet it has at least one, and possibly several of a particular feature that you walk through every day, without even noticing its existence, and yet it did not commonly exist until the mid-18th century.
So when was the last time you prepared a meal, if ever, where the majority of it didn’t come out of a box or a can or a jar or a frozen package?