Kitchen Bling

In the May issue of The Atlantic, Megan McCardle has an article that takes a look at how kitchens have become more of showplaces than areas where people actually do some cooking.

She recounts how the kitchen has changed over the decades, with the newer ones being blingtastic with fancy knives, expensive countertops, and high-end housewares even though the numbers of people cooking at home have been going down for years. The research she cites provides this contrast: "even in the 1980s, 72 percent of meals eaten in the home involved an entree cooked from scratch; now just 59 percent of them do, and the average number of food items used per meal has decreased from 4.4 to 3.5. That's when we're home at all: by 1995, we consumed more than a quarter of all meals and snacks outside the home, up from 16 percent two decades earlier."

If you're interested in how American kitchens have changed, check out "The Joy of Not Cooking."

I used the verb "changed" instead of "progressed" or "evolved" because I think some of the buying habits related in the article are silly or just flat out dumb.