Sarah Archer

You might have a cast iron stove.

You might have two or three rooms.

Nice.

And you might hang out in the room that's most warm, which is also going to be the room where you cook food.

So in as much as it's sort of it's a marker of how class in America has changed and what we expect and want for ourselves.

And so there's kind of the way that kitchen technology was presented to computer to computers.

Right.

See, this is the result of AI.

The way that kitchen technology was presented to consumers, starting in about the 1930s and then really taking off in the 1950s, was that you could almost jump a couple of notches on the class ladder.

And the way that they illustrated this was to show, let's say...

What Julia Child would call the servantless cook, this sort of new thing in the world, like a person who entertains and is well-to-do enough to entertain and have the kind of leisure time to do so and the money, but isn't wealthy enough to have staff.

And this is, again, this is kind of a new category of person.

And that you're like throwing a dinner party and having and like being your own staff in a way.

And this is maybe like part of the consolidation of the middle class and post-war America.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So this is the consolidation of the middle class.

And so the idea that you can then, a lot of the advertising for kitchen appliances, like remember that movie that we watched in a previous episode?

It was a sort of industrial short for, I want to say it was from Motorama, but it was the sort of appliance fantasia where like a masked man whisks a woman away to show her all the incredible appliances.

you know, it was like Frigidaire.