Complaining about Kitchens and Coat Racks

We may be missing the human element again. The first question to ask is how well has the art of cooking survived the centuries of time. From what mine eyes can see, cooking skills seems to be a dying art. The younger generations can't boil water. Really!

I recall meeting a young married couple in the late nineties. They had an ~ 1-yr-old daughter. The daughter loved french fries. As did the parents. I was visiting and the young girl was crying because they had run out of frozen french fries. This newest generation has an abundant access to all different brands of frozen french fries.

To make a long story short, the young daughter and the parents were sad because there were no more frozen french fries to cook and there was a big rain storm outside. But I am looking at a 20-lb bag of the most beautiful Idaho potatoes they had just received as a gift from the local Farmers Market. So I asked them "Why don't you make them from scratch?"

"Make them?"

"Why not? You've got a 20 lb sack of potatoes just lying there on the floor?"

Now, I know the look of shock and confusion when I see it. And I recognized it then as well, but it was out of place so I was confused too."

"We don't want a baked potato. We want french fries."

"Well slice 'em up and fry 'em."

"Fried potatoes?"

"Well what the hell do you think french fries are, and for that matter where do you think french fries come from?"

To make a long story short, I cut up several of those large potatoes and fried some. The look on their eyes when they reluctantly tasted one. And the love affair when they did. It turned out they were spending a fortune on frozen french fries and were wasting a 20 lb bag of potatoes every month from the local Farmers Market.

So, how many people can actually cook in the HV? People are very busy working in the future. And I can imagine fast food restaurants stacked on top of each other and thriving with the inevitable immeasurable increase in the efficiency in every aspect of the business. Burger joints make a killing on a single burger because their food costs are lower overall.

But, if you've got access to all kinds of food being delivered to your doorsteps, why would you ever need to cook, unless for its culinary pleasure. But let's face it. We would cook a lot less now if we had immediate access to all of our favorite restaurants. Most of us only live within a quick driving distance of only one or two restaurants. And we grow tired of eating the same old thing. We want and we need variety in our diet. If I had immediate access to that variety, I am not sure I would cook.

You don't have to worry whether you live within distance of a pizza restaurant who delivers. With drones every pizza restaurant in your town can deliver to you. Drones make offering and making delivers both cheap, economical, and painless. So, in the HV I live within the delivery zone of every type of food. You really think I'm gonna cook?

Uh, Honor in early books complains about Hydroponics reports. Hydroponics section on the ship is growing FRESH food...

So, No, they have not figured out how to keep food tasting fresh with perfect nutrition in the Honorverses time. If that was the case, there would not be a hydroponics section onboard a spaceship.

Relax wrote:Uh, Honor in early books complains about Hydroponics reports. Hydroponics section on the ship is growing FRESH food...

So, No, they have not figured out how to keep food tasting fresh with perfect nutrition in the Honorverses time. If that was the case, there would not be a hydroponics section onboard a spaceship.

I'd forgotten that - but sure enough in HoE Honor is suffering through hydroponics inventories. And a bit later we get "a view of the hydroponics section and followed it with another one of Samantha. The female treecat sat primly under one of the tomato trellises used to provide the crew with fresh food"

So that, and another excerpt from ACtD confirms that the hydroponics are for growing the crew fresh food; not just used for CO2 scrubbing/oxygen generation.

That ACtD excerpt was "But hydroponics wasn’t exactly a critical part of Vanguard’s official war footing. Not when the ship was parked in permanent high orbit over Manticore, with fresh fruit and vegetables just a shuttle trip away." (but of course ACtD is about 370 years before HoE)

cthia wrote:To make a long story short, I cut up several of those large potatoes and fried some. The look on their eyes when they reluctantly tasted one. And the love affair when they did. It turned out they were spending a fortune on frozen french fries and were wasting a 20 lb bag of potatoes every month from the local Farmers Market.

The takeaway from this story is that the young couple now know the benefits of preparing potatoes and cooking for themselves. Which is the opposite of your argument.

Relax wrote:Uh, Honor in early books complains about Hydroponics reports. Hydroponics section on the ship is growing FRESH food...

So, No, they have not figured out how to keep food tasting fresh with perfect nutrition in the Honorverses time. If that was the case, there would not be a hydroponics section onboard a spaceship.

Actually, no, this doesn't imply that they cook the fresh food. Hydroponics is growing foodstuff, sure, but how that is processed into meals is an unknown factor. They still need biomass to make food somehow and the HV doesn't seem to have perfected the technique of creating food from C, H, O, N, P and other substrate atoms. Complex organic chains are still required.

However, I'm neither saying that they simply process the biomass into a fine paste and make meals from that. There's a psychological effect here and keeping the crew fed with fresh food may help with crew morale. There's a lot of grey area in-between.

Aboard ships, crew members don't cook for themselves and there are no individual kitchens. That's what stewards are for. Maybe some of the highest-ranked officers aboard (CO and flag) have dedicated areas for themselves, all others share pantries and food preparation areas ("kitchens"), according to rank.

cthia wrote:We may be missing the human element again. The first question to ask is how well has the art of cooking survived the centuries of time.

We can stop the argument here: you said art of cooking. As an art, I doubt it will ever disappear, even if we become digital/virtual people (you can simulate cooking, à la The Matrix). This is what we saw of Roszák: he cooked because he liked doing so and he put a lot of effort into preparing nice meals for his friends (and political allies). That's not a scalable effort and he didn't do it for his crew aboard his ships.

From what mine eyes can see, cooking skills seems to be a dying art. The younger generations can't boil water. Really!

Indeed, though here you're using "art" in the metaphorical sense. It's more accurately "cooking skills" as you said.

And I qualify in that category. I know how to make ramen (did that last evening, because I was lazing around), I know how to prepare nice steaks, eggs, omelets, rice, some other simple things. But I've never tried anything more complex than those. It simply does not hold my interest.

I recall meeting a young married couple in the late nineties. They had an ~ 1-yr-old daughter. The daughter loved french fries. As did the parents. I was visiting and the young girl was crying because they had run out of frozen french fries. This newest generation has an abundant access to all different brands of frozen french fries.

I do suppose today having kids does make a difference, though. Parents will want children to eat nutritious meals and that may require some effort.

Though well-of parents can also hire someone to do the cooking for them, then store in the fridge or freezer. Today, that usually uses the kitchens that exist in all dwelling units; in the future, I could see families living with only small kitchenettes (to prepare ramen, omelets or frying fries) and everything else is delivered to them once a week. It's perfectly easy to hire someone to prepare a week's worth of meals and come store it in the fridge, in particular in low-wage countries where manual labour is still cheap.

But, if you've got access to all kinds of food being delivered to your doorsteps, why would you ever need to cook, unless for its culinary pleasure. But let's face it. We would cook a lot less now if we had immediate access to all of our favorite restaurants. Most of us only live within a quick driving distance of only one or two restaurants. And we grow tired of eating the same old thing. We want and we need variety in our diet. If I had immediate access to that variety, I am not sure I would cook.

Exactly.

Though the pandemic has taught me that I can get food delivered from way further than the usual restaurants I'd have gone to. The delivery fees are non-trivial (unless you happen to have a subscription service, which I do) and the cost of each meal is definitely higher than what it would have cost me to prepare on my own. But I can order food from the web browser 20 minutes before the end of a (virtual) meeting I'm in without having to excuse myself, a repeat of the dishwasher and floor mop example I gave above. I just have to remember not to do that while in presenter mode

Another trick is to order three meals from the same place, to amortise the delivery fee.

You don't have to worry whether you live within distance of a pizza restaurant who delivers. With drones every pizza restaurant in your town can deliver to you. Drones make offering and making delivers both cheap, economical, and painless. So, in the HV I live within the delivery zone of every type of food. You really think I'm gonna cook?

Drones are not there yet. Amazon tried to do that, but automated drone delivery is still not working. They're also running up against the economies of scale of having the traditional delivery services deliver parcels, so the economic incentive to continue to develop the technology is lacking.

cthia wrote:But, if you've got access to all kinds of food being delivered to your doorsteps, why would you ever need to cook, unless for its culinary pleasure. But let's face it. We would cook a lot less now if we had immediate access to all of our favorite restaurants. Most of us only live within a quick driving distance of only one or two restaurants. And we grow tired of eating the same old thing. We want and we need variety in our diet. If I had immediate access to that variety, I am not sure I would cook.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Exactly.

Though the pandemic has taught me that I can get food delivered from way further than the usual restaurants I'd have gone to. The delivery fees are non-trivial (unless you happen to have a subscription service, which I do) and the cost of each meal is definitely higher than what it would have cost me to prepare on my own. But I can order food from the web browser 20 minutes before the end of a (virtual) meeting I'm in without having to excuse myself, a repeat of the dishwasher and floor mop example I gave above. I just have to remember not to do that while in presenter mode

Another trick is to order three meals from the same place, to amortise the delivery fee.

You both are arguing from a position of affluence. Cthia's young couple with child would find themselves on the other side of the economic equation (as his not so short story indicated).

tlb wrote:Another trick is to order three meals from the same place, to amortise the delivery fee.

You both are arguing from a position of affluence. Cthia's young couple with child would find themselves on the other side of the economic equation (as his not so short story indicated).[/quote]

You're quite right, unfortunately. Too often, the poorest members of society have to resort to the cheapest food which is not sufficiently nutritious today or contains too much of sugars and other carbohydrates.

I hadn't brought this up so far because such food is not the best, so it's not a choice, it's a necessity. Unless we can't afford as a population to feed everyone with nutritious food, that wouldn't help the argument. The argument had been whether kitchens had gone out of vogue for people who could afford them.

In any case, cthia's story was about 20 lb of potatoes from the Farmer's Market (which usually isn't the cheapest) going to waste. If this family were living on an incredibly tight budget, they wouldn't have bought something they couldn't make use of in the first place.

In other Sci-Fi scenarios, the vast majority of population eats like that (algae-based protein from vats), but not in the MBS. In fact, it might very well be how the undercity of Old Chicago does get fed in the HV, but we haven't seen the details of that in the stories so far.

Poor people can afford to feed themselves with decent food, but they are not going to do it buying fast food. You have to cook from scratch.

Every drive through the poor area of a major city? I used to do this regularly about 25 years ago in Chicago and what I remember was the that the streets were lined with fast food places (mostly not chains), liquor stores and beauty shops. And boarded up buildings.

By 2020 it was improving, but then the city stood by when people burned down all the supermarkets....

tlb wrote:You both are arguing from a position of affluence. Cthia's young couple with child would find themselves on the other side of the economic equation (as his not so short story indicated).

ThinksMarkedly wrote:You're quite right, unfortunately. Too often, the poorest members of society have to resort to the cheapest food which is not sufficiently nutritious today or contains too much of sugars and other carbohydrates.

I hadn't brought this up so far because such food is not the best, so it's not a choice, it's a necessity. Unless we can't afford as a population to feed everyone with nutritious food, that wouldn't help the argument. The argument had been whether kitchens had gone out of vogue for people who could afford them.

In any case, cthia's story was about 20 lb of potatoes from the Farmer's Market (which usually isn't the cheapest) going to waste. If this family were living on an incredibly tight budget, they wouldn't have bought something they couldn't make use of in the first place.

In other Sci-Fi scenarios, the vast majority of population eats like that (algae-based protein from vats), but not in the MBS. In fact, it might very well be how the undercity of Old Chicago does get fed in the HV, but we haven't seen the details of that in the stories so far.

No, the discussion was whether kitchens were going away, period - end of sentence! It was accepted that for the truly affluent having a kitchen was a matter of choice.

According to Cthia's story, the bag of potatoes was a gift.

Kevin Usher lived in the bad part of Old Chicago and I gave the text that showed he had some sort of kitchen.

PS: You obviously did not preview your post or you would have noticed that you exchanged my quote with yours.