Making a Meal of the Family Meal: Cooking Dinner

About this episode

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