BOSKO BLAGOJEVIC
"It may be objected that such things cannot be taught by books. Why not? Why may not the structure of the human body, and the laws of health deduced therefrom, be as well taught as the laws of natural philosophy? Why are not the application of these laws to the management of infants and young children as important to a woman as the application of the rules of arithmetic to the extraction of the cube root?… Why may not the healthiness of different kinds of food and drink, the proper modes of cooking, and the rules in reference to the modes and times of taking them, be discussed as properly as rules of grammar, or facts in history?"
"A treatise on domestic economy for the use of young ladies at home
and at school : Chapter XXXII, On The Care Of The Kitchen,
Cellar, and Storeroom." (1856), Catharine Esther Beecher.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, when the text quoted above was first published by Catharine Beecher, - older sister to famed abolitionist and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe - the industrial revolution had already transformed most of the western world. It had reconfigured the parameters of leisure and work time, of civic and familial relationships, and of the domestic spaces where those relationships were formed through practice and reformed in accordance to changes in available technologies and lifestyle tastes. One such area - the kitchen - is perhaps the only zone in the post-industrial home where the fruits of industrialization, those sleek stainless steel machines which promise to automate and mechanize our domestic lives, are engaged to perform for human bodies when they are in daily need, tormented by those most banal and quotidian pangs of hunger. Whereas the digital tools of the contemporary office and nomadic professional mediate our correspondence and social engagements, abstracting our presence in the world into the dispersed and immaterial, the kitchen's high-tech progeny of the industrial revolution acts at close proximity to our bodies, reaffirming our corporeality. The kitchen is the entry port for purchased goods, the laboratory where new methods and technologies in the preparation and preservation of food are implemented, and the site where they are made obsolete and outmoded.
The manager of the domestic kitchen is a mitigator of want and hunger; it is up to him or her to keep up-to-date on the ever-changing standards of taste and distaste, the practices of cleanliness, and the technological modes of increasingly streamlined food preparation. It is a role that critic and curator Ellen Lupton has described as "the discipline of consumption," an "economically devalued yet demanding labor." The kitchen as a site of invisible labor has been historically kept apart from the living and leisure spaces by any who might afford the luxury. The wealthy southern landowners of colonial America, for instance, often built their kitchens apart from their plantation homes, in outhouses operated by slaves and servants who might sleep in that same space. By the twentieth century the American kitchen had been streamlined into the middle-class home and entrusted to the care of the housewife, who ideally made its operation seamless and invisible to the rest of the family. The kitchen is defined by its function, by the assurance of surplus food in storage and the regular scheduling of meal times. It is a laboratory where changing standards of sterility and cleanliness are coupled with manufacturing practices of planned obsolescence to deliver shifting strategies of addressing the socially constructed needs of bourgeois domestic life. Rather than assume the role of the scientist or lab tech, however, the traditional homemaker, if she is a success, makes her job in the kitchen appear effortless, her labor utterly transparent. She becomes part of the kitchen’s ecology, at one with the toaster oven or stand mixer. The fusion of industry and design as seen in the illustrated home magazines of the 40s and 50s made possible a kitchen life invested with pleasure and beauty, and this too, joined the worker to the workplace.
"In the 1956 film Design for Dreaming - a promotional trailer produced by Frigidaire - a housewife in the "kitchen of tomorrow" feeds a recipe card into a slot, triggering a series of appliances that automatically bake a birthday cake complete with lit candles. Other films of the era promised that future kitchens would include... a transparent cylindrical refrigerator! A robot butler! And an oven that cooks a roast in minutes "by electronics."
The preceding quote appeared in a January 2006 article in Fast Company magazine, in which the writer goes on speculate on the more reasonable technical innovations homemakers can expect to integrate into their "kitchens of tomorrow" - the glass refrigerator described mimics and aestheticizes the transparency of kitchen labor. While monolithic, yet modular appliances may have constituted the modern kitchen mid-century, the 21st century kitchen is networked and cybernetic, equipped with machines that will be able to read barcodes from food items and adjust the preparation times in response. The kitchen here remains a place of lived fantasy, the preordained site where technology's utopian, transformative power has manifested in the past, and the site where it will do so again in the future.
That the visions projected in the Frigidaire film haven't all exactly come to fruition isn't an indication that the proposed technology is underdeveloped, but rather that the film's producers miscalculated the trajectory of modern domestic desire. Kitchen technologies today are preoccupied with specialization - an advanced espresso machine is more attractive than an automated birthday cake maker or robot butler. In this the kitchen resembles more an assembly line than a workshop, where food items are passed from one mechanized agent to the next as they undergo transformation. But just as the products of industry gain ground in the domestic sphere, the inherent ideologies responsible for the design and possibility of those industrial products, too, make their way into the home and domestic practices. But if the domestic kitchen really is an assembly line, what, then, of the final product? If this was the food, finally prepared and ready for family consumption, there would be nothing to distinguish this kitchen from the kitchen of the mess hall or fine restaurant. The final product, therefore, is instead something far more abstract; it is much better described as a sense of calculated order, an indispensable part of the home, an efficient management of resources and human demand, a production of comfort, an obfuscation of work.
FURTHER READING
Lupton, Ellen. The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992.
Lupton, Ellen. "Case Study House: Comfort and Convenience." Assemblages, No. 24, House Rules. (Aug. 1994), pp. 86-93.
Johnson, Lesley and Justine Lloyd. Sentenced to the Everyday. New York: Berg, 2004.
Avakiam, Arlene Voski and Barbara Haber (eds). From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgAoewjpvY0"
www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/next-kitchen.html