Part 106 (1/2)

Let us face this fact. In the residence part of a city the kitchen is almost the only source of dirt.

The kitchen-stove furnishes its quota of coal-dust, coal-gas and coal ashes. But for the kitchen a heating plant could warm many blocks of houses, and keep that source of dirt at a minimum, thus clearing our streets of the ash-can and ash-cart nuisances.

The kitchen is wholly responsible for the garbage pail; each area or alley gate offering for inspection and infection its unsavory receptacle; and beyond that, the kitchen is in large measure responsible for the stable. In the quiet streets where people live, the horses which defile those streets, which break the quiet, wear the pavement, and wring the hearts of lovers of animals, are almost all kitchen horses.

At early dawn the milkman's horse--many milkmen's horses. Then the baker's horse--many bakers' horses. Then the iceman's horse, the fishman's horse, the market man's horse, the vegetable man's horse, the grocer's horse, the confectioner's horse; with, of course, the ashman's horse, the garbage man's horse, and the coal man's horse. All these horses and their various stables, help to maintain the breeding of flies; and the kitchen maintains them.

n.o.body ever liked flies. The rigorous housewife has long pursued them with waving towel and flapping paper; dark plates of fly poison are set on high places where the children can only occasionally get it; and the dreadful ”tanglefoot” hangs here and there, agonizing our ears with the frantic buzzing of its slow-dying victims.

The housewife objected to the fly because he made work for her, speckling all things offensively; and the house-husband objected to him because he walked on his face, or his bald spot, and woke him from needed slumber.

Also no one likes flies floating dankly in the soup, disguised as currants, or sacrificing their legs to the b.u.t.ter. But these distastes are as nothing to the new Terror of the Fly. He is now seen to be a purveyor of disease--we might say _the_ purveyor of disease.

The cat and the dog, the rat and the mouse and their small parasites are responsible for some diseases. The deadly Anopheles only brings malaria, even the Stegonyia has but one fever in his gift, albeit a yellow one; but Musca Domestica deposits on our food, on our clothing, on our pillows, on our very faces, according to the N. Y. Medical Journal, the germs of ”tuberculosis, leprosy, cholera, summer diarrhea of children, plague, carbuncle, yaws, tapeworm, swine-plague and typhoid fever.”

Now that is a nice beast to have in the house! And more especially that is a nice beast to breed in the house, to maintain, feed, shelter, and encourage.

When shall we be willing to face the simple fact that the preparation of food is not a suitable process for the home?

The vegetarian will say that if we eliminate meat all will be well; let him read again my tale of the Cabbage and the Bluebottle. But meat is unquestionably the worst of our food supply as far as flies are concerned. The fly delights in the voluminous cow, even while alive; thrives in her stable, makes free with her milk, and follows her from steak to soup with ceaseless interest. If we had no meat, no fish, no milk, no cheese, no b.u.t.ter, no eggs, we should reduce our bait a little; but there would still remain plenty of fly provender, and also the horses to bring it to our myriad doors.

Why not keep the food and leave out the fly?

Let us for once fairly face the possibility of a home without a kitchen.

Look at it--a real house, in no way different from any other house in front. But it does differ in the back--for it has no back! Its back is another front, just as pretty, just as dignified, just as _clean._ There is a dining-room in this house, cool, sweet, well-screened from pa.s.sing, vagrant winged things, but that is all; no kitchen, no kitchen-sink, no raw meat coming in and garbage going out, no grease, no smell of frying.

But how shall we get our food into our dining-rooms?

It will be delivered, cooked, in s.h.i.+ning aluminium receptacles hot and steaming, cold and fresh--all this _has been done._ And it and its dishes, will go away again, tight-closed, leaving you to brush up the crumbs and fold the tablecloth. If you want your own elaborate sets of china enough to wash dishes, that is quite permissible, a butler's pantry will take care of that.

There is no more reason why a civilized family should cook its own food in its own kitchen than kill its own pig in its own backyard.

Then rises the pathetic cry about not liking it. Of course some people won't like it. Some people never like any new way of doing things.

Food habits are proverbially hard to change.

But I can tell you who will like it--that is the woman who is tired of planning meals, tired of ordering meals, tired of managing servants, or tired--deadly tired--of her own cooking.

And one generation of children, growIng up in kitchenless homes, eating food that is prepared by trained experts and not by ”greenhorns,” used to science and art in the food supply instead of affection and ignorance--they will like it.

We like what we are used to, and if we have been used to it for a thousand years we like it more intensely. But that proves nothing at all except that we are used to it. It does not prove the thing is good for us--nor that we can not get used to something better and like that, in course of time, just as devotedly. One would think, observing the att.i.tude of most of us toward any proposed change, that so far we had never changed at all.

But with all history behind us; with that long, long flight of little steps we took so many centuries to climb, and then, closer, the swiftly heightening large steps we have been taking in these later years ever more swiftly; what then accounts for our always clinging so desperately to the one behind, and resisting so furiously being forced up one more!

It is like the old story of the liberal-minded Grandma and the combination suit. She visited her daughter in New York, resolved to keep up with Progress.

They took her to hear Ignatius Donnelly with his Baconian theory; Ingersoll hammering at Moses, and Jenness-Miller with her Reformed Clothes for Women.