Clothes are cheap because they're made in low income countries. I don't see meals being prepared thousands of miles away and shipped to me. And of courses meal delivery is about as ungreen as imaginable. Somebody has to cook it. Then wrap it in something that will keep it cold, hot, frozen or fresh. Then somebody has to deliver it. The recipient unpacks it, tosses the huge volume of probably not recyclable packaging, then gets to eat it. Cost is double, triple or ?.
Living in rural Maine, one either cooks or eats crap. Tonight is pizza night at my house. I made the dough yesterday, enough for three pizzas. Froze two pies worth. Tonight, we'll thinly slice potato and sweet potato on a mandoline, slather on some chimichuri sauce and caramelized onion, top with my wife's homemade vegan cheese. Wash it down with a local beer.
Anyone can cook and everyone should know how. It's fun, cheap and healthy.
I built our kitchen, based on our experience in other kitchens. It's not too big, but has plenty of storage, including a tiny pantry. Oven is a few feet above the floor, which I highly recommend. Under the counter, drawers, not doors and shelves, work better. No extravagant appliances. It's a working kitchen, not a showy one.
We live in small town Maine...many of the delivery services just aren't available here. They're the province of cities and suburbs. The lack of self - sufficiency of relying on meal delivery is alarming to me. From a financial perspective, I could earn more with the billable hour (s) I now spend cooking dinner and cleaning up than what it would cost to buy meals. But is efficiency really the only criterion?
We now live in a lively and well appointed small town in rural France, with quite good access to local food (baker, weekly market and fish van) I volunteer at the community garden and get stacks of (dirty, cumbersome) fresh veg, and we grow a bit more, we are retired, have time to shop locally and cook almost entirely from scratch. I am the female and cook more, mostly because I like it and my husband pulls his weight in other ways which suit him better, but he cooks too, and we shop and stock take and plan meals together. We are both committed to living sustainably and with the minimum of waste. Consequently, we need quite a lot of fridge and freezer space for leftovers and extra portions (to avoid wasting food or energy), stocking bags of muddy fresh veg and conserving gluts of produce. We tried at first to live with one small fridge and freezer, it didn't work.
I'm fortunate enough to have a kitchen remodel under way (finishing sometime this month) that will give me the kitchen of *my* future so you're getting a long comment because I've been eating, sleeping, and dreaming kitchen stuff for over two years.
I don't really think there's "a" future to plan for as far as individual needs and preferences for size, fixtures, how much they cook whether it's from scratch or frozen packages or a microwave reheat of takeout. I don't judge any of those options--life is too short to stress about individual actions when we need institutional and systemic change to make a real difference on carbon.
We're building for two known futures that will affect everyone: We're going to get older, and as climate change continues to affect growing seasons, shipping, and everything else, we need to support local food production, both our own and the folks at the farmers' market.
My husband and I planned ahead for getting older. Your note about the lack of universal design is spot on--we have a lot of housing stock that's going to have to be remodeled as people acquire disabilities and new housing isn't being built to those standards. The waste of resources when it could be done right from the beginning! Like streets I walked on the other day: new development, beautiful new sidewalks that come to an abrupt stop at the patch of land that doesn't yet have housing on it, with no ADA ramp, no marked crossing to tell drivers someone may have to get to the sidewalk on the other side. Penny wise and pound foolish, as my Depression-era parents would have said.
We got a one-level house on a transit line, we both bike and walk for transportation, we downsized. We've started adding food-growing space and native plants to have habitat for pollinators. We're in our local Buy Nothing group so we give and get lots of items in a community exchange that doesn't cost any of us any money and extends the useful life of unwanted/unneeded items. We put solar cells on the roof and will be getting batteries for those times when the local grid goes down. I have a clothesline out back and we have a high-efficiency washer/dryer.
The kitchen we're creating is for cooking, baking, and preserving food because that's how we feed ourselves much of the time. Some of its features:
- Giant workstation sink so I can be cleaning veggies while my husband fills the coffee pot.
- Counter space for rolling out dough, and a Kitchen-Aid lift so I can use it even if I can't lift it. (This became much more relevant when I broke my wrist and couldn't lift anything heavy--forecast of a potential future.)
- A pantry and other storage space.
- Drawers that will be easier to get things out of than the rotted-out cupboards I'm replacing that required stooping and peering into dark spaces. (We donated the usable parts to Habitat for Humanity.)
- Energy-efficient task lighting.
- Cork flooring that's resilient underfoot and will be kinder to aging joints, and cork is a renewable resource without the outgassing of petroleum-based options.
- Smooth surfaces everywhere for easy cleaning--no ornate grooves in cabinet fronts, no fancy frilly light fixtures. That might not be everyone's taste. For us, at each turn we asked what would be easier to maintain over time, which consumes fewer resources in time, energy, and money. Do my husband or I want to be scraping gunk out of tiny corners on an intricately carved cupboard front when we're 85? No we do not.
Before moving to this town and location we also looked at things like coastline changes, earthquake and volcano risk (we're in the Pacific Northwest, I can see Mt. Rainier on a clear day, and I remember Mt. St. Helens erupting), potential for wildfires, and human-made problems of various types. We bought in a location that mitigates these as much as possible. A beautiful kitchen in a house sliding downhill because a developer cut down all the trees that held the soil isn't going to do me much good.
While US home cooking declined in the late twentieth century, it is unclear whether the trend has continued. This study examines home cooking from 2003 to 2016 by gender, educational attainment, and race/ethnicity.
Methods
Nationally representative data from the American Time Use Study from 2003 to 2016 and linear regression models were used to examine changes in the percent of adults aged 18–65 years who cook and their time spent cooking, with interactions to test for differential changes by demographic variables of gender, education, and race/ethnicity.
Results
Cooking increased overall from 2003 to 2016. The percent of college-educated men cooking increased from 37.9% in 2003 to 51.9% in 2016, but men with less than high school education who cook did not change (33.2% in 2016) (p < 0.05). College-educated women who cook increased from 64.7% in 2003 to 68.7% in 2016, while women with less than high school education had no change (72.3% in 2016) (p < 0.05). Women with less education spent more time cooking per day than high-educated women, but the reverse was true for men."
I used to be intrigued by the idea of Jetsons kitchen of some kind, where a robot or smart appliances did all of the cooking for me. I am now much more enamored with the idea of a large kitchen with lots of work surface, storage, and basic, functional appliances (fridge, range, dishwasher). But I also have discovered a love of cooking and sourcing good, fresh food that was not present a decade or so ago when I fantasizing about robots and the rehydrating microwave from Back to the Future that takes a small dry cake and turns it into a large fresh pizza seconds later.
"Frederick, Austin and Schütte-Lihotzky wanted to free women from the kitchen; in the fifties and sixties, women were pushed back into the kitchen to raise the baby boomers; today, many people work long hours and live in tiny apartments. Maybe women shouldn’t have to do cook if they don’t want to?"
Sorry, but the vast majority of women (girls? ladies? menstruating people?) today simply CAN"T cook and have ZERO interest in ever learning how because of disparaging BS claims like the one above. On top of that, we have a modern society full of convenience and options, of every ethnic cuisine from around the world and an internet with a zillion recipes to demonstrate exactly how to cook them from beginning to end.
What we DON'T have any longer is home ec class in school. We don't teach practical skills like how to sew, cook a meal, create a home shopping budget, can, process, or freeze food. And women who express an interest in or desire to be a "trad wife" who stays at home to raise a family and maintain a home are disparaged with vehement vitriol the likes of which I've never seen before. Why? Is the desire to provide for one's family, to stay at home and raise YOUR children the way YOU'D like to raise them such a toxic idea to feminists and the communists who suggest it "takes a village to raise a child" (Hillary Clinton) without distinction of **who** the people are in that village, and what they potentially are teaching your kids—things you may not want them to know about until they're older and more developmentally mature?
Well, to be honest, as I was reading this article I was surprised by how many thinly-veiled examples of communist ideology were being proposed—ideas like domestic chores being a bane of women, of oppression, of designing kitchens with underground railways from a centralized processing kitchen, and more. I can honestly say that this comes as no surprise to the likes of me, GraniteGrok, coji1 and a few others who recognize that food preparation in the modern world is not women's work (they don't know how and refuse to learn how), that more and more men are fully capable of being adept at cooking because they aren't marrying, and since the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, it behooves both men AND women to know how to cook for their own tastes and budgets. That we're having a debate about what a kitchen is supposed to be based on "saving" women from the drudgery of housework is outdated thinking in addition to a lie. If more women were trad wife material instead of the progressive, liberated "strong, independent" women they claim themselves to be, then the argument about saving them from that limiting lifestyle might have some basis in reality behind it—but that's not the case and hasn't been since the 1950's, when women who WANTED to be liberated and independent first were, as opposed to the women who WANTED to be a trad wife raising her family and providing the support to achieving the American dream separate—but no less important than—from earning a paycheck like her husband did.
We've fallen a long way, but our kitchens should NEVER look sparse and sterile like the pictures above ... not unless we have no families, no close relationships to maintain, and no desire to be self-sufficient (you know, the Marxist goal.)
Schütte-Lihotzky was an avowed communist, went from Frankfurt to Moscow to work on housing there, left in a hurry because of a Stalinist purge and was jailed in Germany, couldn't get any work in the fifties because of it. But Frederick worked for Ladies Home Journal and, with her economist husband, pretty much invented planned obsolescence. "Rejecting the traditional idea that products should be made to last, they argued instead for obsolescence as a kind of ‘creative waste’ that kept the industrial economy running smoothly. " So it takes all kinds to design a kitchen.
OK, if it takes all kinds to design a kitchen then why the brouhaha over what CURRENT kitchen design is, or what it OUGHT to be in the future? The simple truth is this:
1. You use the kitchen to cook and serve food
2. People gain great enjoyment from eating, and more so when in a social setting
3. The kitchen is, and always WILL be, the heart of a home
You quoted Robert Ferdman in the WaPo, saying, "Between the mid-1960s and late 2000s, low-income households went from eating at home 95 percent of the time to only 72 percent of the time, middle-income households when from eating at home 92 percent of the time to 69 percent of the time, and high-income households went from eating at home 88 percent of the time to only 65 percent of the time." But the caveat is that in the mid-1960's we didn't have hardly *ANY* fast food companies or locations, the interstate system was just being completed for more rapid interstate and international distribution of food, birth rates were first beginning their slow decline, and more people were relocating from rural to urban areas for better job opportunities. All that combines to explain why people ate at home less (not to mention, the fracturing of the nuclear family as divorce was destigmatized) but the kitchen is still seen as the final hold-out against the changes in time, traditions, and family dynamics. Arguing that we won't need to have a kitchen at home any longer should drone delivery services truly take off and revolutionize the way we consume is just silly; after all, bad weather still happens, so should people go hungry if drones can't fly? Or rip out their kitchen to expand ... what, the bedroom? You need something architecturally-related to rail about Lloyd, why not go off on the bullshit phenomenon of master suite bedroom gigantism in recent years? After all, aren't bedrooms meant to sleep in rather than escape the pressures of family life?
I look at it this way: when SHTF those people who have certain skills like cooking over an open fire will be highly sought after; having an induction stovetop after the next Carrington Event will render it little more than a heavy paperweight. Kitchens are no different—if you know how to use one, who cares if it's tiny or big? But if you spend a lot of time in one (as I do) you kinda want to enjoy your time spent there, same as in a vehicle or office.
And nice to see that one of the things that you rail against the most, planned obsolescence, started at your end of the political spectrum. "Creative waste", eh?
That's Rich. Oh, speaking of Rich - take it away, VB!
There is no addressing to be found, Grok. Claiming that communal production and distribution of food preparation is right out of the Marxist playbook. You, I, and Lloyd are all of a particular age to have seen the long lines gazing longingly at empty bread shelves in the USSR in the 1980's; it's not anything anyone wants to see again, despite certain voices saying it would be better than our current capitalist system.
I like your small refrigerator green kitchen integrating the outside and local with the wintery inside. Our houses are cookie cutter, little boxes on the hillside, an outpost of sprawl, where takeout is the norm, and the consumer does not get a say, or need have have one, in what the kitchen should look like. And the tools have changed. I live with an Anova steam oven and Greenspan baking trays where oil is unnecessary and clean up involves a soak and wipe down. I do have two single burner induction stovetops, one each for inside and outside, the whole enchilada, pot, stove, and steam rack, for $59 each at the local Chinese market but I don't use them much.
My vision for the kitchen of the future is just the kitchen of the present but with vastly improved ventilation and lighting.
No bare cooktops (especially gas ones) with nothing above, no sad recirculating 190cfm range hood that covers maybe half the cooktop's surface area, no microwave doing double-duty (terribly) as a range hood. Instead have a range hood that extends 12 inches beyond the cooktop in every direction (except the backsplash), and either vented externally with a fan of equal output supplying makeup air or recirculating with an HRV/ERV intake in the kitchen.
No single boob light providing all the lighting to the entire kitchen. Task lighting everywhere. Each cabinet should get its own light as well as a light for its portion of the countertop.
Oh, and going back to a previous post of yours, laminate countertops are great, but only if they stop trying to look like granite, marble or whatever. Just a solid matte color.
Clicked through to Derek Nicholson's site: I love that kitchen. Where IS the small fridge? Do you remember the idea behind the parts of the countertop that are hollowed out? And It looks like the lower cabinets to the left are extra deep? So many details I am curious about!
Clothes are cheap because they're made in low income countries. I don't see meals being prepared thousands of miles away and shipped to me. And of courses meal delivery is about as ungreen as imaginable. Somebody has to cook it. Then wrap it in something that will keep it cold, hot, frozen or fresh. Then somebody has to deliver it. The recipient unpacks it, tosses the huge volume of probably not recyclable packaging, then gets to eat it. Cost is double, triple or ?.
Living in rural Maine, one either cooks or eats crap. Tonight is pizza night at my house. I made the dough yesterday, enough for three pizzas. Froze two pies worth. Tonight, we'll thinly slice potato and sweet potato on a mandoline, slather on some chimichuri sauce and caramelized onion, top with my wife's homemade vegan cheese. Wash it down with a local beer.
Anyone can cook and everyone should know how. It's fun, cheap and healthy.
I built our kitchen, based on our experience in other kitchens. It's not too big, but has plenty of storage, including a tiny pantry. Oven is a few feet above the floor, which I highly recommend. Under the counter, drawers, not doors and shelves, work better. No extravagant appliances. It's a working kitchen, not a showy one.
We live in small town Maine...many of the delivery services just aren't available here. They're the province of cities and suburbs. The lack of self - sufficiency of relying on meal delivery is alarming to me. From a financial perspective, I could earn more with the billable hour (s) I now spend cooking dinner and cleaning up than what it would cost to buy meals. But is efficiency really the only criterion?
We now live in a lively and well appointed small town in rural France, with quite good access to local food (baker, weekly market and fish van) I volunteer at the community garden and get stacks of (dirty, cumbersome) fresh veg, and we grow a bit more, we are retired, have time to shop locally and cook almost entirely from scratch. I am the female and cook more, mostly because I like it and my husband pulls his weight in other ways which suit him better, but he cooks too, and we shop and stock take and plan meals together. We are both committed to living sustainably and with the minimum of waste. Consequently, we need quite a lot of fridge and freezer space for leftovers and extra portions (to avoid wasting food or energy), stocking bags of muddy fresh veg and conserving gluts of produce. We tried at first to live with one small fridge and freezer, it didn't work.
I'm fortunate enough to have a kitchen remodel under way (finishing sometime this month) that will give me the kitchen of *my* future so you're getting a long comment because I've been eating, sleeping, and dreaming kitchen stuff for over two years.
I don't really think there's "a" future to plan for as far as individual needs and preferences for size, fixtures, how much they cook whether it's from scratch or frozen packages or a microwave reheat of takeout. I don't judge any of those options--life is too short to stress about individual actions when we need institutional and systemic change to make a real difference on carbon.
We're building for two known futures that will affect everyone: We're going to get older, and as climate change continues to affect growing seasons, shipping, and everything else, we need to support local food production, both our own and the folks at the farmers' market.
My husband and I planned ahead for getting older. Your note about the lack of universal design is spot on--we have a lot of housing stock that's going to have to be remodeled as people acquire disabilities and new housing isn't being built to those standards. The waste of resources when it could be done right from the beginning! Like streets I walked on the other day: new development, beautiful new sidewalks that come to an abrupt stop at the patch of land that doesn't yet have housing on it, with no ADA ramp, no marked crossing to tell drivers someone may have to get to the sidewalk on the other side. Penny wise and pound foolish, as my Depression-era parents would have said.
We got a one-level house on a transit line, we both bike and walk for transportation, we downsized. We've started adding food-growing space and native plants to have habitat for pollinators. We're in our local Buy Nothing group so we give and get lots of items in a community exchange that doesn't cost any of us any money and extends the useful life of unwanted/unneeded items. We put solar cells on the roof and will be getting batteries for those times when the local grid goes down. I have a clothesline out back and we have a high-efficiency washer/dryer.
The kitchen we're creating is for cooking, baking, and preserving food because that's how we feed ourselves much of the time. Some of its features:
- Giant workstation sink so I can be cleaning veggies while my husband fills the coffee pot.
- Counter space for rolling out dough, and a Kitchen-Aid lift so I can use it even if I can't lift it. (This became much more relevant when I broke my wrist and couldn't lift anything heavy--forecast of a potential future.)
- A pantry and other storage space.
- Drawers that will be easier to get things out of than the rotted-out cupboards I'm replacing that required stooping and peering into dark spaces. (We donated the usable parts to Habitat for Humanity.)
- Energy-efficient task lighting.
- Cork flooring that's resilient underfoot and will be kinder to aging joints, and cork is a renewable resource without the outgassing of petroleum-based options.
- Smooth surfaces everywhere for easy cleaning--no ornate grooves in cabinet fronts, no fancy frilly light fixtures. That might not be everyone's taste. For us, at each turn we asked what would be easier to maintain over time, which consumes fewer resources in time, energy, and money. Do my husband or I want to be scraping gunk out of tiny corners on an intricately carved cupboard front when we're 85? No we do not.
Before moving to this town and location we also looked at things like coastline changes, earthquake and volcano risk (we're in the Pacific Northwest, I can see Mt. Rainier on a clear day, and I remember Mt. St. Helens erupting), potential for wildfires, and human-made problems of various types. We bought in a location that mitigates these as much as possible. A beautiful kitchen in a house sliding downhill because a developer cut down all the trees that held the soil isn't going to do me much good.
Research on gender, education, income, and cooking, with a finding that the majority of women cook. https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937-018-0347-9. From the abstract, based on data 2003-2016:
"Background
While US home cooking declined in the late twentieth century, it is unclear whether the trend has continued. This study examines home cooking from 2003 to 2016 by gender, educational attainment, and race/ethnicity.
Methods
Nationally representative data from the American Time Use Study from 2003 to 2016 and linear regression models were used to examine changes in the percent of adults aged 18–65 years who cook and their time spent cooking, with interactions to test for differential changes by demographic variables of gender, education, and race/ethnicity.
Results
Cooking increased overall from 2003 to 2016. The percent of college-educated men cooking increased from 37.9% in 2003 to 51.9% in 2016, but men with less than high school education who cook did not change (33.2% in 2016) (p < 0.05). College-educated women who cook increased from 64.7% in 2003 to 68.7% in 2016, while women with less than high school education had no change (72.3% in 2016) (p < 0.05). Women with less education spent more time cooking per day than high-educated women, but the reverse was true for men."
I used to be intrigued by the idea of Jetsons kitchen of some kind, where a robot or smart appliances did all of the cooking for me. I am now much more enamored with the idea of a large kitchen with lots of work surface, storage, and basic, functional appliances (fridge, range, dishwasher). But I also have discovered a love of cooking and sourcing good, fresh food that was not present a decade or so ago when I fantasizing about robots and the rehydrating microwave from Back to the Future that takes a small dry cake and turns it into a large fresh pizza seconds later.
"Frederick, Austin and Schütte-Lihotzky wanted to free women from the kitchen; in the fifties and sixties, women were pushed back into the kitchen to raise the baby boomers; today, many people work long hours and live in tiny apartments. Maybe women shouldn’t have to do cook if they don’t want to?"
Sorry, but the vast majority of women (girls? ladies? menstruating people?) today simply CAN"T cook and have ZERO interest in ever learning how because of disparaging BS claims like the one above. On top of that, we have a modern society full of convenience and options, of every ethnic cuisine from around the world and an internet with a zillion recipes to demonstrate exactly how to cook them from beginning to end.
What we DON'T have any longer is home ec class in school. We don't teach practical skills like how to sew, cook a meal, create a home shopping budget, can, process, or freeze food. And women who express an interest in or desire to be a "trad wife" who stays at home to raise a family and maintain a home are disparaged with vehement vitriol the likes of which I've never seen before. Why? Is the desire to provide for one's family, to stay at home and raise YOUR children the way YOU'D like to raise them such a toxic idea to feminists and the communists who suggest it "takes a village to raise a child" (Hillary Clinton) without distinction of **who** the people are in that village, and what they potentially are teaching your kids—things you may not want them to know about until they're older and more developmentally mature?
Well, to be honest, as I was reading this article I was surprised by how many thinly-veiled examples of communist ideology were being proposed—ideas like domestic chores being a bane of women, of oppression, of designing kitchens with underground railways from a centralized processing kitchen, and more. I can honestly say that this comes as no surprise to the likes of me, GraniteGrok, coji1 and a few others who recognize that food preparation in the modern world is not women's work (they don't know how and refuse to learn how), that more and more men are fully capable of being adept at cooking because they aren't marrying, and since the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, it behooves both men AND women to know how to cook for their own tastes and budgets. That we're having a debate about what a kitchen is supposed to be based on "saving" women from the drudgery of housework is outdated thinking in addition to a lie. If more women were trad wife material instead of the progressive, liberated "strong, independent" women they claim themselves to be, then the argument about saving them from that limiting lifestyle might have some basis in reality behind it—but that's not the case and hasn't been since the 1950's, when women who WANTED to be liberated and independent first were, as opposed to the women who WANTED to be a trad wife raising her family and providing the support to achieving the American dream separate—but no less important than—from earning a paycheck like her husband did.
We've fallen a long way, but our kitchens should NEVER look sparse and sterile like the pictures above ... not unless we have no families, no close relationships to maintain, and no desire to be self-sufficient (you know, the Marxist goal.)
Schütte-Lihotzky was an avowed communist, went from Frankfurt to Moscow to work on housing there, left in a hurry because of a Stalinist purge and was jailed in Germany, couldn't get any work in the fifties because of it. But Frederick worked for Ladies Home Journal and, with her economist husband, pretty much invented planned obsolescence. "Rejecting the traditional idea that products should be made to last, they argued instead for obsolescence as a kind of ‘creative waste’ that kept the industrial economy running smoothly. " So it takes all kinds to design a kitchen.
"So it takes all kinds to design a kitchen."
OK, if it takes all kinds to design a kitchen then why the brouhaha over what CURRENT kitchen design is, or what it OUGHT to be in the future? The simple truth is this:
1. You use the kitchen to cook and serve food
2. People gain great enjoyment from eating, and more so when in a social setting
3. The kitchen is, and always WILL be, the heart of a home
You quoted Robert Ferdman in the WaPo, saying, "Between the mid-1960s and late 2000s, low-income households went from eating at home 95 percent of the time to only 72 percent of the time, middle-income households when from eating at home 92 percent of the time to 69 percent of the time, and high-income households went from eating at home 88 percent of the time to only 65 percent of the time." But the caveat is that in the mid-1960's we didn't have hardly *ANY* fast food companies or locations, the interstate system was just being completed for more rapid interstate and international distribution of food, birth rates were first beginning their slow decline, and more people were relocating from rural to urban areas for better job opportunities. All that combines to explain why people ate at home less (not to mention, the fracturing of the nuclear family as divorce was destigmatized) but the kitchen is still seen as the final hold-out against the changes in time, traditions, and family dynamics. Arguing that we won't need to have a kitchen at home any longer should drone delivery services truly take off and revolutionize the way we consume is just silly; after all, bad weather still happens, so should people go hungry if drones can't fly? Or rip out their kitchen to expand ... what, the bedroom? You need something architecturally-related to rail about Lloyd, why not go off on the bullshit phenomenon of master suite bedroom gigantism in recent years? After all, aren't bedrooms meant to sleep in rather than escape the pressures of family life?
I look at it this way: when SHTF those people who have certain skills like cooking over an open fire will be highly sought after; having an induction stovetop after the next Carrington Event will render it little more than a heavy paperweight. Kitchens are no different—if you know how to use one, who cares if it's tiny or big? But if you spend a lot of time in one (as I do) you kinda want to enjoy your time spent there, same as in a vehicle or office.
So what about addressing VB's main points, Lloyd?
And nice to see that one of the things that you rail against the most, planned obsolescence, started at your end of the political spectrum. "Creative waste", eh?
That's Rich. Oh, speaking of Rich - take it away, VB!
There is no addressing to be found, Grok. Claiming that communal production and distribution of food preparation is right out of the Marxist playbook. You, I, and Lloyd are all of a particular age to have seen the long lines gazing longingly at empty bread shelves in the USSR in the 1980's; it's not anything anyone wants to see again, despite certain voices saying it would be better than our current capitalist system.
I like your small refrigerator green kitchen integrating the outside and local with the wintery inside. Our houses are cookie cutter, little boxes on the hillside, an outpost of sprawl, where takeout is the norm, and the consumer does not get a say, or need have have one, in what the kitchen should look like. And the tools have changed. I live with an Anova steam oven and Greenspan baking trays where oil is unnecessary and clean up involves a soak and wipe down. I do have two single burner induction stovetops, one each for inside and outside, the whole enchilada, pot, stove, and steam rack, for $59 each at the local Chinese market but I don't use them much.
My vision for the kitchen of the future is just the kitchen of the present but with vastly improved ventilation and lighting.
No bare cooktops (especially gas ones) with nothing above, no sad recirculating 190cfm range hood that covers maybe half the cooktop's surface area, no microwave doing double-duty (terribly) as a range hood. Instead have a range hood that extends 12 inches beyond the cooktop in every direction (except the backsplash), and either vented externally with a fan of equal output supplying makeup air or recirculating with an HRV/ERV intake in the kitchen.
No single boob light providing all the lighting to the entire kitchen. Task lighting everywhere. Each cabinet should get its own light as well as a light for its portion of the countertop.
Oh, and going back to a previous post of yours, laminate countertops are great, but only if they stop trying to look like granite, marble or whatever. Just a solid matte color.
Ban the boob lights! Not good task light, not good ambient lighting.
Clicked through to Derek Nicholson's site: I love that kitchen. Where IS the small fridge? Do you remember the idea behind the parts of the countertop that are hollowed out? And It looks like the lower cabinets to the left are extra deep? So many details I am curious about!