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.

Historically, not a great many people wanted to emulate vegetarians.  They were seen as cranky dinner party pests, also sentimental, moralistic, and only attractive to each other - the men with their wispy beards and sandals, the hairy women.  And their taste standards for food were low, with reliance on nut loaves and mushy pulses.  Leopold Bloom’s thoughts express the everyman view in Ulysses as, spotting a vegetarian bore on a Dublin street in 1904, ‘[h]is eyes followed the high figure in homespun, beard and bicycle, a listening woman at his side.  Coming from the vegetarian.  Only weggebobbles and fruit.  Don’t eat a beefsteak.  If you do the eyes of that cow will pursue you through all eternity.  They say it’s healthier.  Wind and watery though.  Tried it.  Keep you on the run all day’.

However… that was last century.  Now, reasons to reconsider giving up meat are inescapable and multiplying all the time.  First is the brutality of turning very sentient creatures into food through factory farming and cruel abattoir practices.  Next come energy use and pollution implications that give meat eaters a much larger carbon footprint than vegetarians - apparently a meateater with a bicycle produces more carbon than a vegetarian Hummer driver.  Then there are the dodgy practices of the meat industry highlighted with horsemeat found in cheap mince.  Clearly unmedicated horsemeat in itself is no worse than pig or cow, but the unaccountability, indeed criminality, of parts of the meat industry threaten people’s health.  Journalist John Harris clarifies things here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/17/no-more-excuses-go-vegetarian.

Add to this the way the immensely depressing state of fish stocks from the predations of unsustainable fishing industries around the world also rules out fish-eating as a decent option.  And finally, some powerful new evidence shows that vegetarians are a third less likely to suffer from heart disease: http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2013/130130.html.

On the positive side, delicious veggie fare is more accessible than ever.  On the go, good sandwich, sushi and soup options are readily available.  For home cooking, Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, to give one example, is crammed with delicious, special recipes that banish for ever any idea that going meatless equals some kind of suffering.  And a new alternative is due to be released in mid May , Elizabeth David’s On Vegetables.   This is a collection of classic sans-meat dishes made with generally much shorter ingredient lists than Ottolenghi’s, according to no-nonsense European traditions.  It is also sumptuous looking – so not a hair shirt in sight.  At the very least why not have a couple of meat free days a week (and keep your mind open to extending this)?

Becca, my wife, came up with the idea for the book last year after she had gone vegetarian. We sat down at our kitchen table, with Felix our second son, who had been one for some time and compiled the recipes together. We then passed on the list to Jill Norman, my aunt’s literary executor, who acted as editor for the book.

I was vegetarian for the last nine years of Elizabeth’s life and enjoyed cooking many vegetarian meals with her. She was not vegetarian herself but had no objection to the principle. She was interested in simple, honest, local cooking and many of the recipes in her early books were vegetarian - reflecting the diets of the regions of the Mediterranean. What would she have thought of her recipes being published as nearly vegetarian compilation? I believe she would have moved with the times and been keen to help promote vegetable based meals, perhaps have been happy to define herself as a flexitarian - the new term to define those who wish to eat meat very occasionally or in special circumstances.

We left the recipes untouched and some contain small amounts of meat, fish. With a little skill and imagination you can keep the essence of the dishes and cook vegetarian meals, and hence the name of the book, Elizabeth David on Vegetables.

The book is published by Quadrille.