I learned to cook three meals daily (not just helping mom) in something similarly equipped, and only slightly better looking. Very few tools. Entertained. Not much else to do in that kind of situation but cook and share meals. Cooking in my very fancy new kitchen is so very much more fun!!! Being able to buy nice groceries and not have to make everything (except bread) from scratchy-scratch-scratch, is sooooooooo much nicer. I do cook from scratch, but also like things like pear-cardamom chutney that I don't want to have to make myself. I love induction at 100', rather than LP at 4000. I LOVE having ovens! And space! And helpers! I LOVE my new kitchen!!!

Sorry. No pause given for the GW kitchen, just for the vagaries of politics and the consequences that the people have to deal with.

You don't need to go to Cuba to see kitchens like that. Plenty of people have similar ones here in the US.

GW consists mostly of 'privileged' folks with cash and time to spare. BTW, my parents' kitchen was smaller than most GWers' bathrooms. :-)

Plenty of people don't have kitchens like that in the US.

Not when you can go down to Walmart and buy a microwave for $49.You can afford that living on the government dole.

But there are Americans who have kitchens like that. Some have horribly mismanaged lives others just arrived here with no money or marketable skills.

As opposed to most Cubans who have mostly made good choices given their options and still end up with kitchens that look like that.

Maybe your state has better services, deeageaux, but we don't have the government dole in California. All we have is Welfare to Work. You work a minimum of 36 hours a week for it, and you have to have children to qualify, and combined income must be under $15,000 a year. The lifetime cap for Welfare to Work is two years. You can't own a car worth more than $4,500 dollars or have more that $200 combined in savings, checking, IOUs, stocks, bonds, or under the mattress cash.

Horrible, dangerous, roach-ridden housing costs more than your monthly check. A microwave? What good is that if you can't pay the electricity bill? By the way, the official unemployment rate here in CA is just under 12%. That's almost 1/8th of the people in the state. In the Imperial Valley, it's 30%, more than during the Great Depression.

All it takes is one short bout with cancer to put some of us into these circumstances.

Americans who live like that can be just as hardworking, smart, and thrifty as you, deeageaux. And by the way, wealth is not proof of moral superiority or a good work ethic.
Statistically, it usually just means you had wealthy parents.

Renee

In our country there are vets returning from the hideous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who are loosing their houses and families and some are living in the street and I worry about what the backsplash. But what am I doing to help?
I think this can get way off topic and a political issue can quickly divide us who are drawn together by kitchens and not by the state of the world and my beloved country.

Ignoring the old f*rt stinking up the room, I wonder how long it will be before somebody sees that cool, pyramid-shaped tile vent hood and spends $6000 to reproduce it?

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that very cool range hood marcolo!

This is an interesting posting to me. I struggle with the level of excess that I live with, and I live with much less than what I see commonly around me. There is a Studio Ghibli movie called Spirited Away about a young girl whose parents get turned into pigs because they couldn't stop consuming the food at an old, shut-down carnival. In my mind there is no question that we have gone off the deep end as far as consuming resources go, and I am very appreciative of this reminder.

I spend so many hours of my life looking at pictures of fancy kitchens and thinking about my own dream kitchen. This is probably a sad waste of energy when I think about what I could be doing in the world.

Just yesterday, ironically, we decided to forgo our latest kitchen plan and build simple shelving that we can make beautiful with paint and curtains. A lot of it we can salvage from the old house we live in so it will have its own charm. It will still be a kitchen worth more than most people's entire homes when you take the entire human population into account, but I feel relieved to have simplified things. We'll be less stretched to cover the costs, and I am hoping that the simplicity of the final room will be a reminder that living well doesn't mean living expensively.

Thanks again for the post!

All love

Michael

"Like"
..(to mermanmike's post)

Just by coincidence I read the following a few minutes ago from Eleanor Roosevelt, July 4, 1938.
In this country we do need to be reminded of our antecedents, so as not to allow ourselves to get soft physically and excuse it by saying that the strains on us today are different, and that we must meet them in different ways. True, they are different, but qualities which met pioneer difficulties are needed to meet the problems of modern civilization. When the physical world provides you with luxury and ease, you must not deteriorate in inner qualities, and that is one of our dangers.

A young man said something to me the other day which I have treasured ever since, for it is a philosophy which we all might well think about. "Luxuries," he said, "do not hurt us if we work for them. They will not hurt our children if our children are conscious of the fact that each thing which we acquire has demanded from us labor of some kind." As an example he cited his small children, who though barely two and four years old, had been taught to take care of each new purchase for the home just as if it were their own. When they heard their parents talk about a piece of furniture, they realized that it represented work and thought and they treasured it.

In contrast, an older man was telling me yesterday how his grandchildren troubled him. "Fine children," he said, "but entirely lacking in the understanding of what it means to pay in work for what you have, and therefore without any sense of the value of money in actual labor represented."

Well,I know what my kitchen says about me: A slob lives here.

I'd like to claim it's my son...and he does contribute
his fair share...but the truth is my kitchen starts off
neat and clean and within a day or two degenerates into a
mess of crumpled dishtowels, crumby counters and peanut
butter jars left on the counter. After a few days of the
mess, I clean and neaten and the cycle starts again. Sigh.

"But there are Americans who have kitchens like that. Some have horribly mismanaged lives others just arrived here with no money or marketable skills."

This reminds me of a true story. A friend of mine had a girlfriend who used to teach Economics at some college (can't remember the name) where most students were from wealthy families but didn't get admitted to IVY league schools b/c of their academic "under-achievements". The students drove much more expensive cars that the faculty, btw.

One day, the professor (the lady I knew) asked her class why some people were poor. A student got up to answer the question and - absolutely sincerely - said that it was because some people did not trade their options right.

I am tempted to get a camera and go snap some pix around here but I don't think they'd let me. Plus, I am not brave enough to go to some of those places.

Once, our electric bill did not get paid b/c of some electronic bill-pay screw-up and DH did not notice. I was shocked that the electric company turned off the electricity almost right away. They are so used to people not paying their bills that they don't allow any grace period here.

It looks like we do not live in the same country. LOL

Oh, yeah, deeageaux, all those lazy US welfare queens with their fancy China-Mart microwaves, they're the ones bankrupting the US, not the billions of $$ we have spent on wars started by self serving politicians, it's those greedy women who want to feed their children who are bringing us down. And your statement "As opposed to most Cubans who have made good choices given their options and still end up with kitchens that look like that", are you serious? Do you really think any nationality is predisposed to making better choices than another? Or that making good choices is a guarantee of anything? Or that the average Cuban even has many choices? Yikes.

And marcolo, that pic of the range hood, ITA, it's coming soon to an Elle Decor near you, count on it.

hosenemesis, great post, I want to "like" that a couple of times.

Finally, thank you for posting this, florantha, really thought provoking article and pics.

sandyponder

Thanks, Sandy! I looked at the essay and just felt that I needed to share it.

As some of you know, my family is outdoors-oriented and that explains all my references to gardening and game cooking. We canoe camp in BWCAW (Minn-Ontario border voyageur's highway), we vacation using a camper trailer, we have children in Fairbanks and do tent-camping activities in the Alaskan back country, and we're historic reenactors who cook full meals over open fire and/or in historic buildings--using the utensils and foods of the 18th or 19th century. All of these activities have been beneficial in helping us keep our priorities somewhat realistic in our home as well.

My in-laws and my own parents' families came from very modest backgrounds, including terrific hardships during the Depression. They valued their own rise into the middle class or lower middle class more than almost anything else in their marriages. My in-laws raised 4 boys in a tiny postwar house in Richfield, Minn. and my father built the smallest square footage house in his Roseville, Minn neighborhood. Additionally, I am the daughter of a WWII prisoner of war--now there's a family experience that sets a whole new vision for the priorities of what belongs in kitchens!

Often you will find me commenting on a GW thread "It's only a kitchen." Well, it is, unless you posit all kinds of other mental impositions on it--status, family cohesion, aesthetics, oasis in midst of modern stress, etc, etc etc. Looking at these Cuban kitchens, it's important to remind ourselves that their owners are people who cook, enjoy eating food, enjoy one another, and bask in the sun. If we all start with these items at the top of our "needs" list it may be that we also incorporate these virtues into our own kitchens so that our kitchens say these things about us as well. I'd hate to lose those virtues as I aspire to more worldly, capitalistic "want list" items.

I recently listened to a radio essay on a set of statistics that indicates that people with more money do not necessarily rate their happiness as high as those who have less. Food for thought. More stuff does not equal much beyond more stuff. Same with fancier stuff.

Amen! :-)

My personal motto is "I cook to live (healthy), not live to cook". You won't find me among "cook of the year" contestants. LOL