Pi-Consulting

It has been suggested that one American in three now weighs as much as the other two combined. This kind of statistic is intrinsically impossible to verify. True or not, the idea is not likely to be contradicted very widely. America has been putting on weight, and fingers have been pointed at the food and beverage industries as the principal culprits.

But wait. Another striking statistic was recently cited (in a report in the Washington Post, no less) as a possible contributory factor. Could the expanding size of ourselves be related to the expanding size of our kitchens?

In the mid-20th century, the typical American kitchen was about 80 square feet in size, while the average American male weighed 166 pounds. Today, average kitchen size has almost tripled, to 225 square feet. American adult males now weigh in at 191 pounds on average.

Mere coincidence?

Aric Chen, as the Post reports, is a specialist writer on architecture and design, and he is convinced that, in this case at least, architecture has had a knock-on effect on human attitudes, and in turn on human behavior.

Chen’s inspired guess dated from his recent co-curatorship of a New York NY exhibition entitled “Value Meal: Design and (Over-)Eating”. He was moved to take on the exhibition project when he saw a news item about a well-known US furniture manufacturer marketing a chair for people whose body weight ranged up to 500 pounds. This firm was responding to a growing problem basically by accommodating it. Wrong answer, Chen said to himself.

He turned his questing mind to the subject of kitchens, rather than chairs. He noticed that kitchen rooms were not just getting bigger, they were also mutating in function, and that society’s attitudes to kitchens were mutating accordingly. This was encouraging people who should not spend more time around food to do just exactly that, he conjectured.

Unlike the smaller kitchens of yesterday, on which the door was closed once a meal had been eaten and the washing-up put away, today’s triple-sized kitchen has been re-cast as a combined living room, entertainment-center, communication post, children’s playroom, dining room, bar-room, meeting point and home office, (quite apart from its primary function as a place where food is stored and prepared). Many now have couches in them. Probably the most requested feature in new-build kitchens is the central island unit, where we park our increasingly capacious behinds on stools, nnd engage in activities that range from yakking about the day’s events to paying the bills online. Oh, and, of course, we eat.

It may be eating as an accompaniment to all those other kitchen-based activities that causes the trouble, muses Chen. He acknowledges that there is something romantic and nice about family and friends choosing the kitchen as the place to foregather, and he traces this back to “a nostalgic era of hearth and home”. But back then, as Chen so eloquently puts it, “You didn’t have big bags of Fritos lying around”.

After the multi-purpose eating island, the next most requested feature in new-build kitchens is “more pantry space”, implying that American feel a pressing need for more room in which to store food. The presence of more food, argue dieticians, particularly processed foods and non-perishable snacks, in itself contributes to systematic over-eating, and eating for reasons other than hunger. A spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association gives the cautious nod to enlarging kitchens and people spending more time in them, on the basis that this will promote home-cooking and discourage visits to take-outs and restaurants, where portions are bigger and calorie-counts are usually higher. However, the ADA expresses concern about kitchens becoming the nerve-center of a household for nearly all activities. Their beef is that “Americans become somehow mindless when they are watching TV, paying the bills, answering the phone or doing e-mails. …Put all those tasks in the middle of the kitchen with food around, and it’s a recipe for mindless munching”

The ADA alternative recipe? “We suggest people stop the “family-style buffet”, where they put food out on the island and tell people to help themselves. We want people to put one serving on a plate, take it out of the kitchen and go eat it in the dining room”.

The underlying aim is to restore a “sense of self-consciousness” about eating. When a kitchen was just a kitchen, it was embarrassing to be caught in front of an open fridge, snacking late at night. The “kitchen-as-kitchen” persuasion wants you to feel that way about impromptu snacking in general.

Seems the old adage about “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” is getting updated to a new variant: “If you can’t handle temptation…”