Evening after evening, billions of people march into the kitchen and cook dinner. Standing over the stove seems like a timeless activity—an impression reinforced if one comes across old TV shows like those starring Lucille Ball or Dick Van Dyke. Watching those black-and-white families in the kitchen, it’s easy to believe you are looking through the screen into the long-ago past. But for most of human history, people neither cooked nor ate the way modern families do. Kitchens were hidden, meals were irregular, and “family dinner” barely existed. Sit at the table with Virginia and Charles as they serve up a survey of the long line of convulsive changes that led to the “long-standing tradition” of cooking dinner in the kitchen.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

Zillow photographs today routinely feature glamorous expansive kitchens with islands, track lighting, and gleaming appliances, inviting viewers to imagine gathering friends and family for dinner.

Historically, this is extremely strange.

For most of human history, people neither gathered around the table for a family meal nor hung around the kitchen. Instead, they mostly ate whenever they wanted, with whomever they wanted (although, to be sure, people have always celebrated communal feasts).

Far from flaunting their cooking areas, the first thing anybody with money did with the kitchen was to hide it—outdoors, if possible, in a separate space, where its smoke and smell would be unnoticeable. In the 19th century, the kitchen was brought indoors, but even then it was kept away from view. It was a place for servants. But over the twentieth century the entire interior of the house inverted itself…

Subjects discussed include:

• The Honeymooners
• Charles’s Pilgrim Ancestors
• Starches and Cellulose, Ripping Apart
• Slow Horse Digestive Systems
• Tiny Human Teeth
• Algonkian Stews
• No Chimneys, No Nails
• Virginia’s ‘70s “Breakfast Nook”
• Raw Carbs
• The Kitchen Triangle
• Biochemical Sugars
• RISD’s Universal Kitchen Project

Ground-breaking examination on the role of fire in cooking and the rest of our lives: Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, 2009.

Scholarly study of oldest known pottery: O.E. Craig, et al., Earliest Evidence for the Use of Pottery, 2013.

Archaeologists on Natufian feasting: David Eitam and James Schoenwetter, Feeding the Living, Feeding the Dead: Natufian as a Low-Level Food Production Society in the Southern Levant (15,000–11,500 Cal BP), Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society, 2020

More than you could imagine knowing about Plains communal hunts: Eleanor Verbicky-Todd, Communal Buffalo Hunting Among the Plains Indians, 1984.

Algonquian cooking: Thomas Hariot,

• (00:01:45) - Why Humans Cook
• (00:07:15) - Cooking Before Kitchens
• (00:13:29) - The Myth of the Family Dinner
• (00:17:47) - From Hearth to Kitchen
• (00:24:03) - The Invention of the Modern Kitchen
• (00:31:00) - Julia Child and the Open Kitchen
• (00:36:27) - Why Kitchens Became Glamorous

I worked out after work: Few sentences would have been more baffling to people in the 19th century, especially if spoken by a woman. Join Virginia and Charles as they explore a little-noticed revolution in daily life: the transformation of hard physical labor from a daily burden to an emblem of personal virtue—and a globe-spanning, multibillion-dollar industry whose omnipresence is as much a sign of our time as social media beefs or flying drones.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

They are everywhere: women carrying gym bags filled with sneakers, sports bras, and high-waisted leggings; men hauling duffels stuffed with performance joggers and training gear. So ubiquitous today is exercise culture—and so large the industries that support it—that it is hard to realize that they are thoroughly new phenomena, enabled by recent breakthroughs in textiles and materials.

A century ago, people expended so much effort in their daily lives that the idea of seeking out more was literally unheard-of. A few isolated souls promoted “physical culture,” but exercise was not a common ideal, especially for women, until the arrival of one of the more important U.S. cultural figures in the 20th century: Jack LaLanne, who launched the first televised workout program in 1953. And then came the 1960s, the discovery of “fitness,” and a revolution that literally reshaped the human body.

Virginia and Charles explore how exercise evolved from necessity to aspiration—and how gyms, Lycra, bodybuilding, aerobics, and athleisure conquered the modern world.

Subjects discussed include:

• Virginia as Class Traitor
• Arnold Schwarzenegger, Body-Fashion Icon
• Charles Dickens’s Ideal Life
• Impact (Astounding, Decades-Long) of University of Oregon Track Team
• Indolence as Ambition
• Spandex, Empire of
• Jogging, its Rise and Fall
• Jane Fonda, Lioness of Leotards
• A Tiny Bit of Polymer Science and Engineering

Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America, by Shelly McKenzie

“The Long-Run Growth in Obesity as a Function of Technological Change” by Tomas J. Philipson and Richard A. Posner

“Americans' waistlines have become the victims of economic progress,” Virginia’s 2001 New York Times column explaining this research (gift link)

Arthur Jones, New York Times obit (gift link), Seattle Times obit

Frank Bond obits here and here

Kathrine Switzer’s account of becoming the first woman to officially enter the Boston marathon (registering as K.V. Switze) in 1967. She was attacked by the race manager but finished the race.

Lycra by Kaori O’Connor

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• (00:00:00) - When Exercise Was Unthinkable
• (00:03:00) - The New Ideal Body: From Clark Gable to Schwarzenegger
• (00:08:35) - The Fitness Panic of the 1950s
• (00:11:58) - The Invention of Jogging and Aerobics
• (00:16:41) - Nike, Phil Knight, and the Air Shoe Revolution
• (00:21:40) - How Gyms Became Mainstream
• (00:23:35) - Jane Fonda, Lycra, and Women's Fitness
• (00:31:10) - New Exercise Fabrics