Supper For Socialists

In a wide-ranging essay about food culture, Jeff Sparrow makes the case that takeout meals have an ideological bent:

“The abolition of the private kitchen will come as a liberation to countless women,” proclaimed August Bebel in his extraordinarily influential 1879 Woman and Socialism (a book that went through 53 German editions in his lifetime). “The private kitchen is as antiquated an institution as the workshop of the small mechanic. Both represent a useless and needless waste of time labor and material.”

Collective cooking as liberation to the tyranny of the private oven remained a progressive orthodoxy into the first half of the 20th century. The Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai explained: “Instead of the working woman having to struggle with the cooking and spend her last free hours in the kitchen preparing dinner and supper, communist society will organize public restaurants and communal kitchens.” …

The rhetoric might sound antiquated but, in a sense, we now take for granted Bebel’s communal kitchens, albeit in private form. The ubiquity of cheap, almost instant takeaway meals represent a transformation almost unimaginable to the 19-century women whose daily routine still involved plucking fowls and skinning rabbits and other tasks now only performed in factories.