In the comment section of my post about how the kitchen is really a fiction for those who live in cities, many protested that they love cooking as an activity, as something to do, as a way to burn time. One person went as far as to compare the happiness cooking gives him/her to the happiness repairing and maintaining an automobile gives his/her neighbor—Americans and their hobbies. But if cooking is so wonderful why were the females of almost every human society found on earth forced/bullied/beaten into the kitchen by men? (Read Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Humans.) Why did men force women to do all of that wonderful work for nothing? Surely, they were not doing women a big favor. They were exploiting their labor power because maintaining a kitchen is a lot of fucking work.

Give this some thought when you look at your beloved kitchen today: There are many men in our globalizing and urbanizing world who still argue that women are biologically suited for cooking—it's so obvious; it's just an extension of breastfeeding. But this is pure bullshit. The kitchen isn't for women; it's for those who are good at cooking. Talent, above all, is needed in the kitchen, and sometimes that talent is found in men and sometimes it's in women. In a city, we finally have the means to turn over cooking to those who have talent and actually see the kitchen as a paradise.