Making a Meal of the Family Meal: Cooking Dinner

Evening after evening, billions of people march into the kitchen and cook dinner. Standing over the stove seems like a timeless activity—an impression reinforced if one comes across old TV shows like those starring Lucille Ball or Dick Van Dyke. Watching those black-and-white families in the kitchen, it’s easy to believe you are looking through the screen into the long-ago past. But for most of human history, people neither cooked nor ate the way modern families do. Kitchens were hidden, meals were irregular, and “family dinner” barely existed. Sit at the table with Virginia and Charles as they serve up a survey of the long line of convulsive changes that led to the “long-standing tradition” of cooking dinner in the kitchen.  Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance Zillow photographs today routinely feature glamorous expansive kitchens with islands, track lighting, and gleaming appliances, inviting viewers to imagine gathering friends and family for dinner. Historically, this is extremely strange. For most of human history, people neither gathered around the table for a family meal nor hung around the kitchen. Instead, they mostly ate whenever they wanted, with whomever they wanted (although, to be sure, people have always celebrated communal feasts). Far from flaunting their cooking areas, the first thing anybody with money did with the kitchen was to hide it—outdoors, if possible, in a separate space, where its smoke and smell would be unnoticeable. In the 19th century, the kitchen was brought indoors, but even then it was kept away from view. It was a place for servants. But over the twentieth century the entire interior of the house inverted itself… Subjects discussed include: The Honeymooners Charles’s Pilgrim Ancestors Starches and Cellulose, Ripping Apart Slow Horse Digestive Systems Tiny Human Teeth Algonkian Stews No Chimneys, No Nails Virginia’s ‘70s “Breakfast Nook” Raw Carbs The Kitchen Triangle Biochemical Sugars RISD’s Universal Kitchen Project References, further reading, and credits: Ground-breaking examination on the role of fire in cooking and the rest of our lives: Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, 2009.  Scholarly study of oldest known pottery: O.E. Craig, et al., Earliest Evidence for the Use of Pottery, 2013. Archaeologists on Natufian feasting: David Eitam and James Schoenwetter, Feeding the Living, Feeding the Dead: Natufian as a Low-Level Food Production Society in the Southern Levant (15,000–11,500 Cal BP), Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society, 2020  More than you could imagine knowing about Plains communal hunts: Eleanor Verbicky-Todd, Communal Buffalo Hunting Among the Plains Indians, 1984.  Algonquian cooking: Thomas Hariot, Chapters (00:01:45) - Why Humans Cook(00:07:15) - Cooking Before Kitchens(00:13:29) - The Myth of the Family Dinner(00:17:47) - From Hearth to Kitchen(00:24:03) - The Invention of the Modern Kitchen(00:31:00) - Julia Child and the Open Kitchen(00:36:27) - Why Kitchens Became Glamorous