Complaining about Kitchens and Coat Racks

I'm about a quater of the way into To End In Fire. There's a passage where Zilwicki explains how kitchens have gone the way of the dodo. Of all the things in the honorvese, that is what stretches my sense of disbelief. I feel like kitchens are too useful a technology to disapper like that. For that matter some of you might remember some of those "into the future" cartoons making fun of the idea. Even back then they thought it was silly idea. Frankly getting rid of kitchens seems more like an anti-poor measure then anything else. I aslo find the idea of the memory material coat racks in a earlier book a bit silly too. I figure even in the future the KISS principal still applies.

It all makes sense if you've read ...

George Orwell 1984

Alvin Tofler Future Shock

That may be Zilwicki's belief, but it is not true in the Honorverse. From chapter 16 of Torch of Freedom:

The two of them were seated in Rozsak's kitchen. Very few people realized that cooking was one of Rozsak's favored hobbies, and he suspected that even fewer would have realized (or believed) that stern, driven, hugely ambitious Sector Governor Barregos actually enjoyed sitting down to an informal dinner, where he and his host served their own plates and poured their own wine, without hordes of servants hovering somewhere in the background. Or, at least, without hordes of supplicants plying him with food and wine in an effort to worm their way into his confidence.

In "From the Highlands", the short story that made Zilwicki a central character:

Usher rose slowly to his feet and paced into the kitchen. When he came back, he was holding two bottles of that ancient Terran beverage called cola. Wordlessly, he handed one of them to Victor. Then, seeing the slight frown in the young SS officer's face, Usher chuckled drily.

Also note that Harrington House in Landing has a kitchen, where Mistress Thorn reigns supreme (although she allows Honor's father to dabble).

A few other references to kitchens throughout the series (and I'm skipping the ones set well in the past. Plus filtered out a lot of references to things like restaurant kitchens).

IEH - At Honor's parent's house on Sphinx, when 8 member's of Nimitz's clan showed up to volunteer to move to Grayson "MacGuiness disappeared into the kitchen in search of the celery all 'cats loved".

UH - In the Hypatia station evacuation; to the little girl Petra: "Tell you what, we’ve really got to run, but why don’t you dash out to the kitchen and make sure there’s water in his bowl?"

ToF - the Zach McBryde's kitchen on Mesa - "It was odd, the way things worked out, Zachariah reflected, carefully topping off his own stein and settling back on the other side of the table in his comfortably furnished kitchen. When they'd been kids, he never would have believed Jack would be the one to go into the Mesan Alignment's security services."

ToF - the Simones kitchen on Mesa - "And yet . . . and yet as Herlander Simões sat in his kitchen, wondering where his wife and daughter were, he discovered that he hadn't relaxed completely, after all."

ToF - Jack McBryde's kitchen on Mesa - ""It's getting harder, Jack." Herlander Simões leaned back in the visitor's chair in Jack McBryde's kitchen and shook his head. "You'd think it would either stop hurting, or that I'd get used to it"

ToF - Victor and Anton in their safehouse apartment on Mesa - " He got up and began walking about, just to stretch a little. The kitchen in the apartment was too small for him to be able to walk more than three paces. Still, they'd been sitting for hours. Anton was tempted to get up himself and join him—except there wouldn't be room. The kitchen was excessively narrow as well as small."

CoG - on Mesa "As was true of modern residential towers everywhere, most people in Neue Rostock ate food that they prepared themselves in their own kitchens. Still, with this many people concentrated in a single building, there were always a large number who wanted to eat at one of the cafeterias or restaurants scattered throughout Neue Rostock."


However - I don't have TEIF's text handy, so I can't see the exact passage where "Zilwicki explains how kitchens have gone the way of the dodo". So I don't know if that's a misinterpretation, applicable to just a very niche situation, or the author abandoning both canon and common sense

Up to the author, it's his universe. However a few people we know are nearly there. Trendy DINKS (double income no kids), their kitchen contains a fridge with a few exotic cheeses and some almond milk. Otherwise water crackers for the cheese and possibly a baguette. They eat out each meal time.
Not my preference.

Daryl wrote:Up to the author, it's his universe. However a few people we know are nearly there. Trendy DINKS (double income no kids), their kitchen contains a fridge with a few exotic cheeses and some almond milk. Otherwise water crackers for the cheese and possibly a baguette. They eat out each meal time.
Not my preference.

Some of the tech firms are (were) willing to provide high quality lunch, dinner and breakfast for at least 5 days a week. In exchange for your 70+ hours a week.

But the idea that people won't even have a refrigerator/freezer and a microwave and depend on going out or delivered food for every meal every day of the year is kind of odd.

Jonathan_S wrote:A few other references to kitchens throughout the series (and I'm skipping the ones set well in the past. Plus filtered out a lot of references to things like restaurant kitchens).

IEH - At Honor's parent's house on Sphinx, when 8 member's of Nimitz's clan showed up to volunteer to move to Grayson "MacGuiness disappeared into the kitchen in search of the celery all 'cats loved".

UH - In the Hypatia station evacuation; to the little girl Petra: "Tell you what, we’ve really got to run, but why don’t you dash out to the kitchen and make sure there’s water in his bowl?"

ToF - the Zach McBryde's kitchen on Mesa - "It was odd, the way things worked out, Zachariah reflected, carefully topping off his own stein and settling back on the other side of the table in his comfortably furnished kitchen. When they'd been kids, he never would have believed Jack would be the one to go into the Mesan Alignment's security services."

ToF - the Simones kitchen on Mesa - "And yet . . . and yet as Herlander Simões sat in his kitchen, wondering where his wife and daughter were, he discovered that he hadn't relaxed completely, after all."

ToF - Jack McBryde's kitchen on Mesa - ""It's getting harder, Jack." Herlander Simões leaned back in the visitor's chair in Jack McBryde's kitchen and shook his head. "You'd think it would either stop hurting, or that I'd get used to it"

ToF - Victor and Anton in their safehouse apartment on Mesa - " He got up and began walking about, just to stretch a little. The kitchen in the apartment was too small for him to be able to walk more than three paces. Still, they'd been sitting for hours. Anton was tempted to get up himself and join him—except there wouldn't be room. The kitchen was excessively narrow as well as small."

CoG - on Mesa "As was true of modern residential towers everywhere, most people in Neue Rostock ate food that they prepared themselves in their own kitchens. Still, with this many people concentrated in a single building, there were always a large number who wanted to eat at one of the cafeterias or restaurants scattered throughout Neue Rostock."


However - I don't have TEIF's text handy, so I can't see the exact passage where "Zilwicki explains how kitchens have gone the way of the dodo". So I don't know if that's a misinterpretation, applicable to just a very niche situation, or the author abandoning both canon and common sense

To play Devil's Advocate only the Honor's house one even insinuates of food being cooked there. Every thing else is just the word kitchen, or more a pantry. I.e. where the food is stored. Maybe Zilwicki was talking about a food prep area with a stove, sink, counter top, etc. are for food prep instead of, for example, simply a pantry and microwave looking appliance to make food.

Puidwen wrote:I'm about a quater of the way into To End In Fire. There's a passage where Zilwicki explains how kitchens have gone the way of the dodo. Of all the things in the honorvese, that is what stretches my sense of disbelief. I feel like kitchens are too useful a technology to disapper like that. For that matter some of you might remember some of those "into the future" cartoons making fun of the idea. Even back then they thought it was silly idea. Frankly getting rid of kitchens seems more like an anti-poor measure then anything else. I aslo find the idea of the memory material coat racks in a earlier book a bit silly too. I figure even in the future the KISS principal still applies.

There is a scene in the March 1923 PD chapter (Zilwicki's meeting with Arianne McBryde), where Anton reflects that the word "kitchen" was being used for the alcove where a very sophisticated machine resided. It appears only newly settled, or backward, planets (as well as people with significant amounts of cash) had rooms where food was actually cooked. BTW, I suspect that the Dempsey Bars probably did cook food.

Kitchens simply are not practical to have in the HV for a lot of people who have such high metabolisms. Let alone an entire family of the buffet-destroyers. A simple kitchen cannot possibly store and prepare enough food for an entire family of Meyerdahl B mods on a daily basis. You'd be shopping and cooking all the time. Stoves would have to have eight burners. And a fridge would have to be a 3-door design to give easy access to someone as wide as Zilwicki.

Making homemade biscuits for a family of four Meyerdahl Bs would require the flour slinging section of the kitchen alone to be the size of a single family home.

Meyerdahl B mods require eating constantly. The three meals a day plan doesn't feed them. So, either the average family will hire a cook, or team of cooks, to constantly prepare meals for this full time (12 hours a day?) position, or they will eat out.

Pizza anyone? The wife is not a slave.



So that is what the K-line is for! Well I'll be.

ZVar wrote:To play Devil's Advocate only the Honor's house one even insinuates of food being cooked there. Every thing else is just the word kitchen, or more a pantry. I.e. where the food is stored. Maybe Zilwicki was talking about a food prep area with a stove, sink, counter top, etc. are for food prep instead of, for example, simply a pantry and microwave looking appliance to make food.

You need to reread the text I provided about Rozsak's kitchen, where the author specifically talks about the joy of cooking.

There would have to be a major economic shift to make it more expensive to prepare the food yourself, at home, than to get the food prepared outside by someone else. Perhaps only the very rich could afford to have everything made from scratch for each meal, but even meals in cans require some preparation; which can require more than a single step in a microwave.

The simplest example is the egg; people prefer a fresh egg to a powdered one. There is a myth that cake mixes did not become popular until people had the accomplishment of adding an egg; instead the fresh egg made it taste better.

On June 13, 1933, the company had informed the U.S. Patent Office that it had made a major breakthrough, arguably the biggest, in cake-mix history—a cake mix that required the home baker to add fresh eggs.

“The housewife and the purchasing public in general seem to prefer fresh eggs and hence the use of dried or powdered eggs is somewhat of a handicap from a psychological standpoint,” Duff wrote in the application.