Chuck

Like, what if your grandmother was a dipstick, right?

So cooking schools also emerged.

And this is important because your grandmother might also, in addition to being a dipstick, might not have been that great of a cook.

Now there's a place you can go to learn to cook well and nutritiously.

That was a big one, too.

And then also, this was a new career path that a woman could take to become a cook in, like, say, a wealthy household.

So they were training now people to work outside of the house doing domestic stuff.

Exactly.

And women were open, or these colleges were open to women as well, too.

So these three things come together.

And one of the other reasons that really made home mech kind of come to life, start sprouting from that fertile soil,

was the transition that America was going through with industrialization.

All of a sudden, you weren't on the farm with your mother and grandmother who were telling you how to do things.

Like, you were in the city now, surrounded by people you've not really ever met before, with a husband who now works in the factory rather than the farm, and you're like, I have no idea what I'm doing.

And so Homek kind of came in to fill that break that had happened, the intergenerational passage of knowledge from mother to daughter.

Homek said, hey, forget mothers.

We're going to tell you how to do this and we're going to tell you how to do it better.

They didn't really say forget mothers.

That wasn't the sentiment.

That was me being a smart aleck.