Clarissa's Blog

Yes, kitchens that aren’t separated from living rooms are weird. I still can’t get used to them.

But the concept has an interesting history. Initially, such kitchen designs were considered a huge feminist advance. They allowed the person who cooked (and that was obviously almost always a woman) not to be isolated from the family while she was cooking. The sequence of “a woman goes into a kitchen => food magically emerges from said kitchen” was broken. Now everybody in the family could see how much work went into food preparation. Plus, a woman didn’t have to cook in silence (or while on the phone with another cooking woman.)

However, there was a negative side to this new design. It allowed and even promoted the brain-destroying, soul-crushing, concentration-slaughtering multi-tasking that leads so many women into anxiety and extreme exhaustion. Now that kitchen and living room were one, cooking was invariably combined with child-minding. So instead of a restorative activity based on a deep concentration, cooking became an exercise in trying to control several very different things simultaneously.

The result is that nobody wants to cook because it’s not even pleasant any more.