The future of home kitchens is not looking good.

I recently made a few observations related to the disappearance of many home practises. It has left me wondering what current practise has already started disappearing and is likely to be completely gone in the next hundred years -or less. The answer; home-cooked meals.

When we bought our home on Kingston Road, someone pointed out our casket window. This, of course, had me questioning the meaning. Casket windows were commonly found in homes built at the end of the 1800s or very early 1900s. The viewing of a deceased happened in living rooms. The casket window, a window free of inner frames could be easily removed, giving in and out access to the casket without struggling through a doorway. Today, viewings and funerals are confined to the lucrative industry of Funeral homes.

When visiting a 200 year-old mansion in Long Island, NY, one of the rooms featured on the tour was the correspondence room, a room entirely dedicated to receiving and replying to mail. Such a room came fully equipped with fountain pens, ink jars, filing cabinets and mail boxes for in and out. Today, we send emails and most of our snail mail consists of flyers and the odd bank or utility bill statement we’ve yet to bother converting to an e-bill.

Another favourite one of mine; many homes built in the 50s+ came fully equipped with a workbench in the basement or garage because daddy had to build and fix stuff, all kinds of crazy stuff. Today we go to home depot and buy whatever it is we simply decided to toss in the garbage rather than fix. Department stores like Woolworth existed because women knitted baby clothes. How relevant is that today? What department store is entirely based on the premise of homemade clothing?

With Manhattan being the capital of restaurants and apartments so small with limited storage, it isn’t uncommon for a New Yorker to use their stove as storage area.

Which leaves me to the punchline. When asked, Millennials say they couldn’t be bothered with cooking, let alone even brewing a pot of coffee. Times, they are changing, and I wonder if in a century from now, someone visiting a home built in our time will question why there’s hole in this room, and a weird looking AC plug?

“Well kids, back in the days, people used to cook in their home. The hole you’re looking at is where the vent was to suck out the heat and smell of onions. As for the stove, it was plugged in this 220v plug”

“What? People cooked their own meals?”

“They all did, from scratch”

I can see it, can you?

Skip the Dishes, Ubereats, restaurants, ready prepped-meals delivered weekly and grocery stores will continue to take over home-cooking and eventually make it seem like an archaic practise. At the very most, our “kitchen” will consist of a couple of cupboards for dishes and tea bags and a serving countertop to pour the take-out food into a regular bowl.

Because I am passionate about cooking, I hold this fear close to the heart but maybe, just maybe, we can stop the vent in our kitchen from becoming something tied to a practise that we’re slowly stuffing in a casket.

Put this computer down. Go cook something -or bake.