Five Reasons Why Home Cooking Should Go the Way of the Dodo: 1903 and 2018
Becoming a home cook was the last thing I wanted to do growing up. In those days, marrying meant embarking on cooking almost every day of the week. If you lived on an isolated farm as my family did, it meant cooking three meals a day, seven days a week, year in year out.
What the alternative was if you were interested in the opposite sex, as I definitely was, was not clear. As feminism entered its second round in the 1960s, I was sure that some resolution would be found to the chore of home cooking.
Well, here we are more than half a century after that second round, more than a century after the first, and where are we?
On the plus side, affordable restaurants and take out have multiplied, while cars and refrigerators have changed shopping from a daily to a once-a-week chore. Few women are so tied to the kitchen as they used to be.
On the minus side, the burden of household feeding–and I don’t meant just cooking but the whole process from shopping to cleaning up and above all planning–remains largely the responsibility of women. Moreover, whoever is in charge of household feeding is barraged with guilt-inducing admonitions about how home cooking is just so admirable and so enjoyable. Many wonder “What on earth is joyous about cooking? People who do not know its capacity to bore, weary, and frustrate are people who have never cooked.”*
So I thought I’d compare the feminist case against home cooking of the early twentieth century with the present situation. I came away with several surprises, particularly what an energy hog the modern kitchen is.
This post is a provocation. I know the arguments are limited by area, class, and race. And I have in fact been a home cook all my life. So please just take it as the provocation it is.
1903. Five reasons to do away with home cooking
Frances Perkins Gilman in 1900 shortly before she published The Home. Photography by Frances Benjamin Johnson. Library of Congress. Public Domain.
In 1903, the American feminist, author, and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman launched a full-scale attack on home cooking in the United States in The Home, Its Work and Influence. The book is available free on Project Gutenberg and well worth a read.
In The Home, she repudiates just about everything that her aunts, Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, had advocated a generation earlier in The American Woman’s Home(1869). Their pitch had been that in a young republic the woman’s place was at home raising the children to be mentally, morally and physically fit to take their place in civic life. Cooking was crucial to the last, family meals to the first two qualification.
“The expression, ‘home-cooking,'” Gilman says, “carries a connotation of assured excellence, and the popular eating-house advertises “pies like those your mother used to make,” as if pie-making were a maternal function. . . . Economy, comfort, and health are supposed to accompany our domestic food supply.” Gilman will have none of this.
Here are five ways she thinks the domestic food supply fails.
1. Home cooking is frequently unsafe.
Here Gilman is chiefly concerned with adulteration. Because food comes from many different sources, she says, because its is handled by many people, and because the individual housewife has little buying power, and because she cannot tell “all the subtleties of adulterated food, nor . . . to secure expert tests of her supplies” she cannot ensure the safety of the food she buys.
It was to be another three years after The Home before the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act that prohibited interstate commerce in adulterated and misbranded drugs and food. Gilman’s concern was a real one.
Gilman does not mention sanitation, though with hindsight the lack of running water and refrigeration in many kitchens must have meant that kitchen conditions were frequently far from desirable.
An up-to-date, well-to-do kitchen of the kind that Charlotte Perkins Gilman probably had. Mrs. Arthur Beales in the kitchen of the Beales home, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, circa 1903-1913. CCA 2.0
2. Home cooking was not healthful.
Home cooks cooked what they knew and liked, which was what their mothers had cooked. There was no reason to think this was nutritious and in many cases it might actually be deleterious.
3. Home cooking often produced dull, insipid dishes.
“Note . . . that in home cooking, there are absent these great necessities of progress–specialisation and competition, as well as the wide practical experience which is almost as essential. . . Compare the “home-cooking” of each nation . . . with the specialised cooking of the best hotels, clubs, or those great official or private entertainments which employ the professional cook.”
The kind of kitchen that many working people had. The family are crocheting caps on the Upper East Side of New York in 1912. They used the gas ring on top of the coal stove for cooking when the weather was hot. Lewis Hine for the National Child Labor Committee. Library of Congress, Public Domain.
4. Home cooking tied most women to shopping, cooking, and cleaning up.
“To keep [the home] food system in motion, is one of the chief difficulties of modern life . . . Nine-tenths of our women [both those who cook for their own families and those who are servants in the families of others] . . . expend most of their labour in the preparation of food and the cleansing processes connected with it.
It’s worth remembering that according the US Household and Family Statistics, when Gilman was writing, 60% of households had 3 or more members, 20% had 7 or more.
5. Home cooking wasted time, energy, money, and food.
“For . . . two hundred families there are two hundred stoves, with their utensils . . . the kitchen and all it contains, with dining-rooms etc. . . . [are] a large item in rent and furnishing. Two hundred women are employed for about six hours a day each . . . [the families] are paying to have . . . wastefully home-purchased food more wastefully home-cooked. . . One trained cook can cook for thirty easily.”
Gilman concludes “What we need in our system of feeding the world is not instinct, affection, and duty, but knowledge, practice, and business methods.”
2018. Five reasons to do away with home cooking
What reasons are there to do away with home cooking today and how do they compare with Gilman’s.
Interestingly almost all the images of home cooks that come up on a quick search show admirable cooks enjoying what they do.
I’ll change the order and begin with the biggie
1. Home cooking wastes time and energy.
First, more and more people are cooking for fewer and fewer others. That is, as household size has shrunk, a higher proportion of the population has to cook.
Remember that in 1903, 60% of households had 3 or more members, 20% had 7 or more. In 2006, 50% of households had only 1 or 2 members, only 1% had 7 or more.
Second. As homes acquired gadgets and particularly refrigerators, home cooking began hogging not human energy but gas and electrical energy.
Energy Use in the US Food System, 2010.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2010/september/fuel-for-food-energy-use-in-the-us-food-system/
By 2002 homes were using 28% of the total food system energy, the single largest consumer, bigger than either agriculture, transport, processing, retail, or food service. In 2005 20% of homes had 2 or more refrigerators.
Household size plays into this. Almost every one of those one and two person households has hot running water, a refrigerator, and a stove with an oven. Not an efficient way to do final meal preparation.
2. Home cooking is frequently unsafe.
Home cooks today are less likely to encounter insanitary, adulterated, disease-infested food in the stores than they were in 1903, thanks the foundation of the FDA, the efforts to find ways of testing food etc.
Food eaten at home is often not safe, though. In studies done in the mid 1990s, 36-40% of foodbourne disease outbreaks in France and Germany were associated with private homes. In New Zealand about 50% were associated with poor handling techniques in domestic kitchens. Commercial kitchens are subject to regulation and inspection. Home kitchens are not.
My suspicion is that a a subset of kitchens look more like this. Mine has been known to.
3. Home cooking is frequently unbalanced nutritionally
Unlike Gilman, there are now studies, not just impressions about the healthfulness of home cooked meals. Here’s a recent one. There are a number of problems with these. Most are concerned to decide whether home-cooked meals are more healthful than meals eaten out, which obviously does not mean they are healthful. Most necessarily have a very small sample size.
Nor does recognizing nutritional guidelines necessarily translate into the ability to put healthful meals on the table. I suspect it comes down to the time, skill, and dedication of the cook.
4. Home cooking may still frequently produce unappealing meals.
Home cooks obviously vary enormously in skill and inclination. In the past thirty years, there’s been quite a bit of research on the skills required for home cooking. Here’s one article by Frances Short. If home cooks have time, skill and money, my bet is that they can produce much tastier meals than in the past, given the wide range of both ingredients and advice now available. Equally, I’d bet there are some pretty limited meals out there too.
5. Home cooking is hard on the cook.
The proportion of women working, particularly outside the home, increased. For them, cooking is even more of a burden. No need to expatiate on this.
Conclusion
My biggest surprise putting this post together was just how much energy home cooking consumes. You never see that mentioned in all the impassioned pleas for the home-cooked meal. Worried about the environment? Think twice about that second fridge and the oven heated to 500 for one baked potato! Edit. I am told Americans never make baked potatoes in the oven any more. OK. Try that tray of roasted vegetables instead.
My second surprise was the realization that the shrinking American (and other rich country) household actually increases the proportion of people who have to take on the role of cook. Although the preparation time is not as long for a small household, planning and shopping are just as time-consuming. So here’s another increased inefficiency.
Third, that so many of the 1900 arguments still apply.
Perhaps all this is common knowledge. It wasn’t to me. Thoughts?
_________________
*A favorite quote of mine from Anne Mendelson‘s Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America The Joy of Cooking (1996), 3.
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Communal kitchens were a very popular idea with all my socialist-feminist friends in the 1970s. In practice they have not lasted long, but there is still something appealing in the idea.
Yes, mine too. However the whole trend in American food to catering to individual tastes cuts against this, I think. Restaurants, your speciality, really cater to that leaving the home cook to catch up.
I suspect that “home cooking” has often been a display of status. For my Mom’s generation (age 20 to 50 in 1960’s to 1990’s), my Mom being able to invite Dad’s work colleagues home for a meal was a huge feature for my Dad’s career track. There was reciprocating with a home-cooked meal after a salesman had taken mom and dad out for a fine dinner at a restaurant, and there was inviting the boss and ranking colleagues and their wives for a display meal. There were neighbourhood display meals that were probably unofficially used as practice for the bigger career-influencing meals. Sometimes the neighbourhood display meals were select groups of networking contacts – all under the umbrella of “liking to entertain at home”. If a man’s wife held a job outside the home, they were hard-pressed to participate in this display behaviour.
For my generation (boomers all), there is guilt about not being as excited about display meals, and sometimes “home cooked” means opening the salad bag and baking the frozen pizza – and making the critical culinary decision to leave out the rock-hard croutons. My real “home cooking” is making massive pots of vegetarian chilli or parsnip chestnut soup or not-leftover colcannon – and freezing the excess in single servings for nuking later.
And sometimes a person does home cooking (no scare quotes this time) because nobody else makes a proper grilled cheese sandwich or swiss lunch.
My husband and I are grazers because we don’t have any children. Each of us eats what we want, when we want, and we occasionally each cook enough for the other (yes, most of the grazing is on things I have made – but they are easy peasy non-decorative things). I think another big function of home cooking is the socialization of children into appropriate table etiquette – which is not enough of a good reason for endless drudgery. :)
Thanks for this, April. I always appreciate different perspectives. Certainly in the 60s and 70s home cooking was, to coopt Betty Fussell’s phrase, a competitive sport and a rung on the ladder to success. As you say, I think that is largely gone. The problem of getting food, though, remains. Sounds like you have that down. And yes, children. The old republican ideal of the formation of the citizen at the dinner table still lurks, I think. In short, this is not just a matter of efficiency.
I was thinking about this again in terms of “maximizing utility” or whatever the phrase is used in economics by theorists expecting people to make “rational” economic choices when most of us have never made an economic choice untinged with emotion in our lives. We want this particular house not just because it is the best value and best location and best access to amenities we can afford – but because we *like* it. It may have a kitchen just like our Mom’s or it may have lilacs in the yard – but there will be some reason we choose the thing that has nothing to do with “best bang for buck”.
As we know from having lived in a dorm or knowing someone who lived in a dorm – not everybody does their fair share of cleaning, and some of us (guilty) make an astonishing mess by just standing still in a corner and hardly even breathing. And my cooking is all about wooing the tongue and nothing about feeding the eyes first (I’m reading: not needed). What I want and value isn’t going to be what someone else wants and values (I just recently spent a few days in the hospital [Canada] and the food served there can only be called food because it isn’t anything else – whoever determines the preparation of that *definitely* has different priorities than I do).
So. We’re never really interested in efficiencies for ourselves. Not really. We like more choice and less cost and less work and more status. However – we do like other people to justify their choices through appeals to efficiency. Hence hospital food and shoving old people into communal living.
Yes, there certainly was a period in the 60s and 70s when, to use Betty Fussell’s phrase, cooking was both a competitive sport and a step up on the mobility ladder. That seems to have largely gone for reasons that I can guess at but don’t fully grasp. Feeding even two adults is not easy and it sounds as if you have a system worked out.
Hi Rachel,
Re: The energy question. I do not know the numbers but I would guess that an Instant Pot, which is a programmable slow and/or high pressure cooker, uses much less energy than would a pot on the stovetop or in the oven. These appliances are very well insulated. I can say from my own experience that when cooking with an Instant Pot (or similar– actually right now I use a Moulinex Cookeo) the kitchen does not get so hot.
Then there is the question of a freezer. Again I do not have the numbers handy but it is my understanding that a large freezer kept filled will use relatively little energy– and a freezer, also in my experience, makes for a game-changing pantry extender.
All of which is to say that for a reasonably skilled cook using an Instant Pot (or similar), backed by a well managed pantry and large freezer, the attractions of take out / restaurant meals are going to be, ceteris paribus, less than for a cook with fewer skills, cooking on a stove top and/or oven, and no pantry. In which case, Uber over the Jack-in-the-Box.
I was about to make an unkind comment about scarfing down such fare whilst watching Netflix.
Hi Catherine, the oven is the worst. There’s a reason why most people in most parts of the world don’t use the oven even when they get an American-style stove. And I love my freezer for changing the game of the complicated home cooking I do. I’m not sure though that it doesn’t use a good bit of energy, full or not. I need to get on this. What fascinates me is how home cooking is still the “final mile.” One way or another we have to eat and it’s not that easy.
It’s not that easy, indeed. But I am improving, lately with a keener focus on reducing shopping time. My latest pantry management advance is doing a once-a-month order for home delivery of bulky items and other items for the pantry (papertowels, dish soap, rice, oatmeal, bottled drinks, etc). I have a deep enough pantry that if, for some reason, a given item on order is unavailable– which often happens with these online services– say, dish soap– it doesn’t matter, not immediately.
For fresh foods (bread, veg, fruit, dairy, eggs, meats) and any other items I could not get in my delivery, I shop in-store once a week. It is important for me to see and select those items myself.
I was able to further whittle down shopping time by going to a closer by and smaller grocery. While the selection is relatively limited, it is still very good and I am out of there lickety-split with just what I need. Best of all, if I forgot something and have to backtrack to a distant aisle, that distance is not a football field or four. If I am going to take a long stroll, I would prefer that it be outside, with my dogs!
(According to my calculations, the money I would save by going to a larger store does not compensate for the extra time it would take. Other people may come to other conclusions, of course.)
And finally, whenever possible, I shop at hours when the checkout lines are short to nonexistent.
In all, I think you are right that eating out can make more sense if the cook is relatively unskilled and, to say the same thing, disorganized. Cooking skills are more than about cooking; they include planning and organization skills, and not by some rigid formula, but in such ways that work for you and your family.
As someone with food sensitivities and probably borderline diabetic I HAVE to mostly home cook because mixed resteraunt and food kitchens are not safe or trustworthy. Secondly I think the assumption that I shouldn’t have the right to determine what’s in my food because I’m allegedly ignorant of what I need to be rather condescending, I don’t need a nanny telling me what to eat.
Sure, there’s time and energy problems, but I never poisoned myself at home and I cannot afford to eat at gluten free paleo resteraunts daily. If people want to help they should end capitalism instead of trying to control my eating habits.
Thanks for writing. I mostly home cook because my husband has certain problems so I am well aware of reasons for home cooking. And since neither the medical/nutrition community is much good on how to deal with these, I am highly sensitive to condescension in such matters. Most home cooks cope. I just want to shake up the discussion a bit.
Thank you. Very interesting
By the way, your link to the “interesting article on the skills needed to make a good home cook” is incorrect.
Thank you. Have to run out now but I will correct this in the morning.
I think this has some merit, but there’s real problems.
Some counterpoints to consider:
1) With some skill, home cooking is almost always cheaper then alternatives. Although this is not a direct measure of efficiency, it’s a reasonable stand-in. If there is no alternative to home cooking that’s recognizably cheaper, then it raises questions about efficiency.
2) Restaurant eating, at least as it exists here and now, is not focused on efficiency. Although any well run restaurant will have some highly efficient aspects, those co-exist with a lot of inefficiencies. Examples:
a) Restaurants are open 5-7 days a week, but do the bulk of their business Friday and Saturday. The remaining times are not efficient.
b) “Made to order” still dominates restaurant cooking. This significantly reduces efficiencies.
c) Restaurant kitchens still have food waste. It’s often less then home kitchens but significant amount of the time restaurants have their own kinds of waste.
3) Most restaurant food involves driving. I’m suspicious that energy use alone may be more consequential. Further it typically takes time.
4) It’s not clear to me that the moving the drudgework of cooking to a professional and commercial institutions is in balance better. It may amount to a shell game that just shifts the drudgework.
5) Home cooking may not be safe, but neither are all commercial kitchens. The impact of unsafe home cooking is isolated to that home, but the impact of unsafe commercial kitchens can impact an order of magnitude more people.
6) The commercial area that comes closest to your picture in practice is prepared frozen food. There are real efficiencies of scale, short and convenient preparation for consumers. With some thought, consumers can eat a wide variety of food. But much of the rest of the potential savings disappear. In particular refrigeration is present all through the lifespan, and ovens are heated up for a few users.
I had a young friend who flirted with “Soylent”, a product that addresses all of the points you raise except it’s bland insipidness.
Thank you for this wonderful list of points. Yes, cooking is work and you are right to point out that it’s how it’s shifted around that matters. Another point to consider, though, is how much we can offload to machines–bakeries using kneading machines instead of humans. Very complicated issues.
Your prior writings on this subject relate very much to the book “Baking Powder Wars” by Linda Civitello. In her last chapter she contrasts your approach (yours explicitly with ref. to your earlier article — but you must be aware of this!) to that of Michael Pollan, who of course believes that baking your own bread or roasting your own pig is outstandingly fulfilling as well as traditional and virtuous. My review here:
http://maefood.blogspot.com/2018/05/homemade-or-industrial.html
One experience of my own with people doing away with home cooking was that my neighbors in the 1970s had cooking groups where each of 4 or 5 families would cook for the entire group one day a week. I think they were supposed to eat out on weekends or eat the leftovers or something. Obviously it didn’t address one of your issues — each family had to own a stove and fridge etc. and in fact had to upgrade their equipment for cooking in larger quantities. My husband and I didn’t go for it.
More recently, I’ve seen a trend for co-housing where they have a common kitchen as well as individual kitchens, but it also doesn’t address most of the issues you brought up.
As I think about your objections to “home cooking,” I feel that what most gets in the way is that individuals in our society are very picky eaters, and making their own food (or having one person in the household do so) allows them to indulge their picky tastes.
Also, most home cooks perceive themselves to be saving money. I’ve never seen anyone calculate energy costs into this perception. There are calculations of “carbon footprint” of meats and produce, but those calculations only get the material as far as the grocery store. I wonder if that would change the calculation.
Sorry to go on and on. Best… mae at maefood.blogspot.com
Mae, great stuff as always. The more I think about these issues, the more complicated they seem. I love your neighborhood example. Most of the commentators focus on home versus restaurant cooking whereas there are many other alternatives.
One of the most thought provoking pieces you have written.
BTW the interesting article on the skills needed to make a good home cook link is still not working as of 5/20/18 11.30 am EDT.
Thank you. And now there’s a link.
Home cooking has, for the most part, gone the way of the Dodo! Back in 2008, when the ‘Great Recession’ was rapidly getting underway, I wrote an article called ‘Cheap Eats’ [http://www.hertzmann.com/articles/2008/cheap/]. In it I stated ‘According to the USDA, “The away-from-home market now accounts for about half of total US food expenditures.” And “away-from-home market” doesn’t include prepared food purchased for in-home consumption. To that add the food purchased ready-to-cook—items where you just add liquid and heat. (What would my childhood have been without Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?) Only about a third of us prepare two or more meals at home on a daily basis, and that statistic doesn’t separate scratch cooking from box cooking. When you add everything up, very few of us are cooking meals from basic raw ingredients.’ I suspect that today, the number of households cooking meals from scratch is even lower. Preparing a meal purchased from Blue Apron or tossing a frozen lasagne from Trader Joe’s into a toaster oven is not scratch cooking (no matter what one of my nieces claims).
Peter, I should always check your web site first because we so often think along the same lines. Couldn’t agree more the division between home cooking and going out/prepared foods is incredibly fluid.
That said, the reaction to my post suggests that a subset of Americans thinks that home cooking is in the realm of the sacred rather than the economic.
Good article as usual.
FWIW- I do bake potatoes in the oven but I put them in with whatever meat I’m roasting. No sense wasting the oven space or the heat.
:)
Me too.
in anticipation of our move into The Institution last year, I purchased a 1500-watt countertop convention oven. Since then i haven’t used a fullsize oven, which comes in at 6kW.
Perfect. Love this. It’s so interesting that energy use in American kitchens has risen as cooking has declined. The world of grilling, roasting, baking and using big ovens and separate gas grills for all of it.
Based upon the second graph in this article (http://tinyurl.com/y8uq9yeb), the per capita energy consumption of the US has been realively steady since 1975. I haven’t been able to find this same data broken down by sector to see the relationship of commercial, governmental, and residental power usage, and then residential broken down room of use. My gut says that HVAC and entertainment usage has increased and kitchen usage has decreased. Major appliances have become increasingly more efficient since the introduction of the Energy Star program in 1992.
But what if you’d rather be cooking than anything else? Ken
No one is going to stop you. Enjoy! This is a question about whether a given society should urge home cooking on people. And that is all about power and political beliefs.
In reply to RL comment May 21, 2018 at 2:02 PM
Should? Hmmm.
I prefer to cook at home, usually (not always) and I think it is a good idea for a number of reasons but I would not presume to urge other people to cook at home. Different people have different tastes, skills, time and budget constraints…
All I know at this point is that, as my skills have improved, I have found it more appealing to cook at home. And it strikes me as common sense that, whether one chooses to use them or not, basic cooking skills are a valuable thing to have– along with, say, basic first aid skills, etc.
During the reign of Nikita the Maize Man, in an optimistic flurry of postwar rebuilding, the USSR constructed a lot of apartments with kitchens the size of cupboards. Because every good and progressive Communist would eat at a communal kitchen, private kitchens were there just in case you wanted a cup of tea or needed a cigarette or two.
The Soviet version of a communal kitchen, however, was a stolovaya. Cafeteria would be the closest term in English. Most of the stolovayas managed to prepare coffee indistinguishable from tea, never mind the food they offered. Elbow macaroni boiled into a solid clump with Better Not Ask Ragout. Green potatoes in congealed lard. Nameless fish boiled into glue. Surprise Soup (just throw some veg into the pot, add dishwashing rag, let boil until your shift is over, next morning repeat without rinsing). The only thing one could trust in a stolovaya was a glass of kefir. Unless the glass looked too murky, that is. The stolovaya near where I had my first real job had a cat called Soup Meat, supposed to keep away rodents but forever sticking its head in any plate containing food. Home cooking by a blind granny working in her kitchen straight out of 1903 would be healthier.
I do a lot of home cooking partly because I love to, partly because I avoid some ingredients like wheat, honey, and grapes as much as I can (not exactly allergic but my insides may complain), partly because no one delivers food in our area, partly because the prewhatevered dishes are usually salted to death. So what if I use my oven often? Would driving to a restaurant cost less energy?
I think your points are not unique to the US as these all seemed pertinent for the UK too. I do feel that the issue of which meals are the most healthy, home cooked or eaten out, is very difficult to measure. There are so many differing factors, for example, the amount of butter used in a dish preperation, or how much seasoning is used to flavour the meal. The hygiene side is also problematic. Whilst restaurants and take-aways do need to comply with hygiene regulations, they are not always enforced as well as they should be and the risk of cross-contamination can be high, not just for hygiene issues but for food allergies in particular. I think education really is an important step to reducing food poisoning, increasing allergy awareness and, dare I say, how to cook (or eat) healthily! Jacie
If my millennial daughter is any indication, home cooking is heading to hobby status. She makes a mean pie crust and can read a recipe, but she really isn’t into cooking day to day. She’s single and she eats out a lot. She knows a thing or two about eating well. As a trained chef, I exposed her to a lot of pretty good eating. But, that didn’t change the fact that she’s just not that interested in the cooking end of things. The eating, yes.
It’s similar to making your own clothes, don’t you think? Very few people make their own clothes. It would be ludicrous to suggest everyone make their own clothes now. What you wear doesn’t wrap itself up in so many other aspects of our lives, however. The health questions are more complicated with eating. We’re dealing with health problems associated with diet. Is home cooking the answer to these, or a dead end? I’ve asked myself this question, as I have taught people how to be efficient/effective home cooks. But, I can’t say I have an answer.
Thanks for the provocative post!
Well, if you have any more thoughts on the health and home cooking issue, let me know. It’s not clear to me that home cooking solves the problem, which is basically abundance, I think. We have to learn whole new attitudes to food and it won’t happen quickly. Nice blog by the way.
You are nibbling around an important topic. Unpaid housework, largely done by women. What you leave out is the impact of technology on this. When my grandmother was approaching 100 I asked her what was the most important event in her life. She didn’t even pause, it was “rural electrification” a New Deal program. That meant she automated lots of her tasks. Electric washing machines, replacing her wood cookstove with electric. Etc. And that happened nationally eveywhere. As thesetasks went from 8-10 hours a day to 3-4, women moved into the workforce for work with pay. And a new feminism was born. Equal pay forequal work.
No quarrel with that. I am a historian of technology first and foremost.
April sent these comments which RL is adding because April found the comment box gone.
These belong on the 19 May 2018 entry. I was deterred for the first link when I found the comment box gone, but I really *need* to share the second link with you – so you might as well have both: Guardian predicts kitchens will be no longer built in new dwellings by 2030: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/24/homes-without-kitchens-ubs-report?CMP=fb_us Global News reports that Canadians can now have theatre popcorn delivered to their homes: https://globalnews.ca/news/4302317/cineplex-theatre-popcorn-uber-delivery/ “Dark kitchens” making popcorn for delivery – I think I’m laughing because I am scandalized. :)