Food politics is suddenly at the top of many agendas, in discussions about obesity, food provenance, ever-increasing worries over environmental degradation caused by agribusiness and forecasts of future world food shortages after a recent UN report. The front page of the Daily Mail even told its readers this week to eat less meat - who would have imagined this even a year ago?

One problem is that home cooking has become a hobby carried out by enthusiasts, with families eating together the exception rather than the norm and the pre-cooked food industry aiming to reduce home cooking even further.  Already only 40 per cent of British* families eat a full home cooked meal, and then just once or twice a week, according to a recent article by Sally Peck:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/mother-tongue/9882717/British-familes-dont-eat-together-and-if-they-do-its-often-in-front-of-the-TV.html

From video,  Compassion in World Farming

http://www.ciwf.org.uk/farm_animals/pigs/default.aspx

As home cooking is endangered, it is, in a slightly surreal way, becoming a political act. It can also incorporate these added benefits: buying local or high quality ingredients from sources you know, supporting producers who care about animal welfare, and generating quality time among family members. Designers can help facilitate that path to a healthier diet and to a revitalised local food network which, according to Michael Pollan, ‘passes right through the home kitchen’ (Cooked, p. 193).

Enlightened kitchen design provides the perfect environment for promoting home cooking, eating and sociability - and can even claim to play its role in combatting obesity!  Frequent cooks tend to eat less, eat better and avoid one of greatest contributors to obesity, secondary eating - that is eating or drinking alongside other activities like watching television or driving.

When as either cook or eater you know a good meal is waiting or in prospect, you leave room for it.  When yours is a kitchen in which you really enjoy cooking, where it is done sociably and the processes are recognised as pleasurable, you have provided yourself not just with good food but have heightened your chances of good health and longevity: ‘Obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation’, says Pollan in his new book Cooked (p. 192), citing research by Harvard economist David Cutler.

In a recent project our studio created a piece of furniture structured like a spine that connects work stations of different sizes and heights as well as cooking and serving facilities. It incorporates other features to encourage collaborative cooking, such as a knife block that sits between work surfaces and a rise-and-fall work surface to allow children to participate - with a free spot to use as a leaning post while you chat thrown in. Two work stations seem essential, with end grain tops to encourage good knife work (they don’t blunt knives). Encouraging social interaction in the culinary zone might slow things down, but that is not always a bad thing - slow food favoured over instant gratification? A good-sized serving platform is provided for contemplating completed dishes. Mini work platforms mean order and fun and allow for a wide variety of cooking activities: baking, brewing, reading recipes, preserving, pastry-rolling, veg slicing, garlic chopping… and just being in the kitchen! Let’s take a stand against cooking becoming a minority activity.

*For American families the figure is 67 per cent, but definitions of cooking include pre-cooked ingredients.

I found myself happily agreeing with the comments reported in Saturday’s Guardian by American food campaigner Michael Pollen.  The table, according to Pollen, is the birthplace of sociability and politics, (see Obama’s Kitchen in this website’s Ideas section) where children learn to make their way in the world by trying out and developing the skills of conversation, waiting their turn to speak and accepting and consider the opinions of others.  It can be an early stage for talent too.  Celine Dion says ‘I started at 5 years old in (sic) the kitchen table with my family supporting me. I know where I’m from and I know exactly where I’m going’.

As a designer I tend to promote the largest possible kitchen table to allow for generous seating and multiple activities… homework, laptop browsing, space for plenty of open newspapers and books, as well as large sociable meals.  However, we do need to be careful not to lose intimacy around the table.  An over-large dining table does this, particularly a round one: beware of round tables for this reason.

After the floating dinner party, Northumberland, 2011 by Tim Walker.

I grew up around an extremely intimate kitchen table.  As well as the setting for so many excitable, competitive discussions with my siblings, the table was used by my mother for (very) extended telephone calls with her sisters – unusual for a time when most people’s phone had a solitary life on a hall table.  Both our kitchen and our table were too small.  My father – a doctor, but also pioneer kitchen designer – devised a solution that involved a wooden flap of a table extension that bolted to the adjacent wall when not in use. When in the up position the table took 25% of floor space. He imported one of the first commercial Frigidaires that took up the next 25% and I can’t imagine how we managed.  He also built the sink cabinet in our London house out of the crates that contained the Indian carpets he imported home after the war, timber being unobtainable in London in 1945, complete with recycled teak tops he found from a sink on upstairs landing. The house had been a boarding house with eighteen people living in apparently.

So, a small table is no barrier to the kind of cultural and social richness that Pollen celebrates.  (I have an Irish client who seeks out restaurants with small tables). What matters more are its shape, its position – ideally in an arc of sunlight and with a view of the outside, with preferably something green and growing.  Eye contact should be possible from the table to anyone cooking in the kitchen.  A curved rectangle is a good soft shape that avoids both sharp corners, eye contact with those on the same side and additional space in the middle for serving platters, but without the void of space in the centre of a round table and the long distance to those on its perimeter.

For further reading, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/14/adam-gopnik-table-comes-first-review and http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/may/25/michael-pollan-family-meal-civilisation;  Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner.

I think we all know she was a cook – or it’s very easy to find this out.  I would like to remember some other things about my aunt.

She could not bear being told what to do.  I’m not sure what led to this, but while still in her teens she ran away from home.  She was fed up with family life, such as it was at Wootton Manor in Sussex, and she had plans to become an actress.  The Oxford Playhouse proved a temporary stop, as she and one of its company, Charles Gibson Gowen, escaped to sea in a barge.  They kept one step ahead of the Germans as war broke out until arrested in Venice and subsequently freed by the American ambassador.  She embraced the chaos of the war, working for much of it at the British Army intelligence library in Cairo.  Afterwards, she wrote cookery books, apparently to prove her worth to another (married) lover.

I first knew my aunt properly when she was recovering from a stroke and had lost her sense of taste. What to do?  My father was her doctor and he suggested, along with others, that she open a shop.  She liked this challenge.  It turned out she had been collecting addresses of potteries, cast-iron foundries, chinaware companies, artisan knife makers and tin ware manufacturers during her repeated trips to France. Her favourite shops were ironmongers, ideally French, where the British bought their cookery ware as no cookshops existed then.  From one trip she bought back a collection of cast brass cup hooks and asked me if I could get them made here as there was no English equivalent.  That was my job, fixing things.  As her nephew my duties included changing light bulbs, building bookshelves and sink cabinets and gassing cupboards for woodworm in her Chelsea terrace.

A bus journey to 44 Bourne St Pimlico found me facing an industrial sized plate glass window in an ugly, modern, narrow shop front. A table placed across the entire width to display basic French tin ware, piled high, looked like nothing I had seen before.  Inside were pots set on garage shelves with straw strewn about and bread crocks on the floor and a staircase leading to a concrete basement.  Visiting the shop was my top priority when escaping boarding school for the holidays.  Liza (as we called her) most often hid in the stockroom (people constantly wanted her advice and she found it exhausting) on a bar stool, knees to one side at an old pine dresser.  This doubled up as desk, samples spot, notice board and waiting-to-be-filed zone.  She dressed in black and white, with black, thick-rimmed glasses. I was always welcome and was offered Nescafe in small white porcelain coffee cups.  The place smelled of disque bleu cigarettes, fresh ones and stale.

Customers and friends from all over the world brought trade samples and seasonal food.  I remember figs, persimmons, walnuts and cheeses.  In the basement the objects took on glamour.  She styled things in her shop in a casual but eye-catching and unusual way, the lighting borrowed from a photographer’s studio.  Stock moved so fast when it first opened that everything was sold within a month. Other retailers quickly caught on, even Terence Conran admitted her influence on Habitat in later years. Independent cookshops sprung up in high streets in USA, Australia and here.

Her own kitchen was full of exotic clutter, freestanding furniture, piles of books and strange cooking equipment.  No units and long countertops for her - just a decent table, a stove and some good few dressers and a capacious old cupboard.  I loved visiting just to hang about in that kitchen.

My aunt’s spirit is captured in Artemis Coopers’ excellent biography, Writing at the Kitchen Table.  She excelled in writing, conversation and enjoyment of being in a kitchen.  One last rebellion – her mother had banned Elizabeth and her sisters from ever going into her kitchen at Wootton to prevent them getting in the cook’s way, but she ended up by practically living in one: I installed a stylish cane day bed in her final ‘winter kitchen’.