Drifting away from supper

“Are kitchen stoves going the way of the sewing machine?“

That was a headline in a recent Globe and Mail opinion piece by Sylvain Charlebois.

Apparently, in order to make condos more affordable in cities like Toronto, where housing prices are astronomical, builders are reducing them to the size of a walk-in closet and eliminating non-essentials. Like kitchens, which—what with Uber Eats and all—are apparently atrophying even in homes where they occupy substantial real estate. 

I knew this of course. You can’t spend much time in a supermarket without realizing that many, if not most, people don’t cook regularly. I’m trying not to judge. If you can eat well or feed a family healthy meals without learning to make gravy, why not?

 “Having food delivered will cost more, but paying a premium for convenience is much less expensive than buying a full-sized condo with a kitchen you won’t use,”the article tells us.

This is not happening in my own circle of friends, but we’re all…well…old. Clearly, a kitchen-less life is more for the young (until we move to the senior’s home, anyway). And let’s take a moment to remind ourselves that we’re talking about a first world, largely urban, phenomenon here. I’m pretty sure most families in the sub-Sahara do not have access to take-out pizza, and Uber Eats doesn’t deliver to my home in rural northern Ontario.

In likening the potential demise of the stove to the demise of the sewing machine, Charlebois may have made an apt comparison. Sewing machines haven’t actually disappeared, and stoves aren’t likely to either. But both have evolved to become crafts rather than life skills. Very few people sew their own clothes, as my mother did and as my friends and I learned to do when we were teens. I know people who make quilts—I have done so myself—but we don’t really need them to stay warm. If we sew, we do so for pleasure and buy clothes made in Thailand.

The grocery store tells a similar story. You can feed yourself and your family nourishing meals from the frozen food section, supplemented by bags of pre-mixed salads complete with dressing in a little plastic pouch. At the same time, though, there’s been an explosion of both the exotic and the traditional for culinary craftspeople: Asian fruits, Indian spices, organic seaweed, heritage vegetables, ancient grain flours. Gourmet, ethnic cookery, home canning, and sour-dough baking have become popular pastimes. 

So it’s chic to sew and cook, if it’s what you want to do. But for an increasing demographic it’s entirely optional.

Is this a problem? Maybe not, but it feels like one to me. As a non-gourmet, pretty basic cook and long-ago farmer, I can think of nothing more essential to becoming a self-sufficient, well-grounded human being, than understanding how to nourish yourself. And I can’t help but see the current move away from cooking as symptomatic of a dilemma that I’ve struggled with for a long time: How do we value and preserve the skills passed from generation to generation of women without tethering ourselves to a time when both the women and the skills were taken for granted and deemed inferior?

In her insightful book on the fragility of our civilization, Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs says that civilizations fail when collective memory is lost. When we forget how to create the conditions that support our culture, we drift. I don’t know whether cooking your own food and eating together at the kitchen table are among those conditions or not. Because of my own history and culture, I suspect so. I wouldn’t include sewing your own clothes, though. Why not? That’s the problem—you don’t really know where the glue mattered until the package falls apart. 

I’m sure Jacobs would not have had us return to a time when cooking from scratch and sewing the family’s clothes defined the lives of women. I certainly wouldn’t. But I think the dilemma is a real one, and I’m pretty sure removing stoves from kitchens will not help to solve it.