Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

by Bee Wilson

From the 1960s onward, a series of historians pointed out the irony that the amount of time American women spent on housework, including cooking, had remained constant since the mid-1920s, despite all of the technological improvements that came on the market over those four decades. For all the dishwashers, electric mixers, and automatic garbage disposals, women were working as hard as ever. Why? Ruth Schwartz Cowan, in her campaigning history More Work for Mother, noted that in pure technical terms, there was no reason America should not have communal kitchen arrangements, sharing out the cooking among several households. But this technology was never widely explored because the idea of public kitchens is socially unacceptable: most of us generally like to live in smaller family