Kitchens in the World, by Income per Month
gapminder.org
gapminder.org
European kitchens for a family tend to have fridges like US hotels and dorm rooms. My understanding is most Japanese kitchens have no oven. They use a wok for most things.
We have ridiculous minimum standards and it actively gets in the way of providing basic, decent housing.
AFAICT, that's a lifestyle that's not available to most Americans. The flipside is of course that our houses are tiny by American standards.
In the few Asian cities I visited, there were also plenty of small cheap eateries in walking distance.
I lived in downtown Boston (USA) for a number of years in 4 different apartments. In each, the kitchen and fridge were fairly small, but I had a neighborhood market no further than a 2-3 minute walk away. A larger market was only 10-15 minutes away. As a result, I tended to eat far more fresh produce since I went to the market almost every day and had little space for storage.
Now that I'm in the suburbs, I have to drive to the store, but I generally don't more than one to two paper bags' worth of goods at a time. I still don't shop for a whole week, even though I have the space.
As a result I have close to no food wasted.
The UK especially produces an astonishing amount of grocery packaging trash compared to the US. I probably produce more food waste in US but I compost so don’t feel too bad about it.
Life is full of trade offs.
Household size in the US has been trending down. We have more 1-3 person households and fewer large families.
When I got divorced and my family size shrank from 4 people to 3, we had to start putting extra stuff in the fridge so the milk wouldn't spoil.
I don't agree. Case in point: a friend of mine grew up without a fridge in her household and it's a massive pain, because now you have to shop daily and frozen goods are of course out of the picture entirely.
All that additional time spent going back and forth and standing in line adds up.
My personal experience is that replacing the fridge from one that keeps four days worth of groceries to one that can hold a week's was a massive improvement in quality of life.
For one it gives you a buffer should the shops be closed or out of the goods you currently require.
And, mind you, I've always lived less than 600m from a supermarket with fresh produce etc.
You're theorizing. I'm speaking from firsthand experience (plus substantial research).
Please do not tell me what solutions I'm allowed to desire for my country. I don't tell you how you should run things in the Netherlands.
That's the big thing Tokyo does best. If going to a convenience store is actually convenient, you don't need a large fridge at all, except for some niche situations most people don't care for anyway (cooking dishes which require a lot of space in the fridge/oven/freezer). I'd also wager eating staples kept in cupboards helps.
Can't speak for the remainder of the kitchen though. You don't need 4/8 stoves, an oven etc., but appliances don't take that much space when packed together. Even fridges don't really take that much more space.
The fridges are small by comparison but, especially in cities, most people shop several times a week and so space isn't a problem.
Europeans choose urban centers with small or even tiny (Paris) apartments. Americans choose suburban huge homes.
Some Europeans choose that. However, a bit more than half (56% in France, similar elsewhere) choose single family houses. That percentage is highest in Scandinavia, lowest in Spain (~33%) and Eastern Europe.
Quick googling shows US has ~75% of the pop living in single family houses, similar to Scandinavia. It seems when people have the means, they choose to live in houses.
I’m not sure why this point escapes so many people. When your country is vast in size and all it takes is a little bit of driving to get where you need to go, most people are going to choose big, cheap houses to tiny, expensive apartments all day long.
Many Americans would like other options on the table. I'm one of them.
That also doesn't change the fact that most people in Europe and US choose to have large single family homes if the option is available.
Where do Americans stand on this in 2022?
[0]https://www.ipsnews.net/2012/05/us-lifestyle-is-not-up-for-n...
Over here in the UK no-one is stopping me from replacing my fridge with whatever fridge I want. It's weird for me to imagine that this could be otherwise. Like, it's just plugged in.
There's a mildly amusing joke I don't quite recall right now about how everything in America is big. Serving sizes, houses, cars, political parties, theme parks, the people...
Our legal standards for what constitutes minimum acceptable housing actively fosters homelessness and any discussion of how those standards are excessive -- even in comparison to other developed countries with high quality of life -- gets ridiculous replies completely shooting down the idea that if civilized, well heeled people in other developed countries can feed a large family with a smaller kitchen, then maybe we have room to design smaller kitchens in some of our housing units.
IMO these standards just make no sense at all, scrap them. The market is literally designed to sort this sort of issue out - if you want a bigger kitchen pay for it, someone will provide.
Artificially restricting the minimum size of dwellings is just forcing people to either overpay for housing or be homeless.
Seems to be “a feature not a bug” because as you suggest, this is actually problematic for people trying to live a simple dignified life.
Like, there's NYC and SF and then there's rural Kansas. There's people earning $10k a year and people earning $10M.
In the UK we don't have any sort of national expectation from what I can tell. I have friends living in house shares, in apartments, in houses, and in really big houses, they all have different kitchens, obviously they do. You get what you can afford, having an expectation is meaningless.
If there's some sort of building code that says fridges have to be massive, then yeah, that's bloody stupid, but that's not specifically a kitchen issue, that's just anti-poor law.
My German relatives told stories about moving in and having no kitchen at first. That's inconceivable in most parts of the US.
Rentals here typically have a fridge that is property of the owner. And you aren't supposed to change it.
Edit: To be clear, they installed a kitchen of their choosing over time. (I also cleaned up typos.)
In Europe, the milk is pasteurized at a higher temperature so it can keep for much longer
Just bought new apartment. Was considering adding more surface and some cabinets in kitchen. That is 3+3 cabinets and work surface about 160cm in width. Price 1000€+ plus installation and delivery...
Really does put things in perspective. So much for rather small amount of space and not even any appliances. Just some cupboards with doors...
In the end I will just buy still pretty expensive shelf, for fraction of cost.
The "kitchen triangle" seems to be an important thing to keep in mind when (re)designing kitchen layouts:
> Developed in the early twentieth century, the working triangle—also known as "the kitchen triangle," also known as "the golden triangle"—is a theory that states a kitchen’s three main work areas should form, you guessed it, a triangle. Specifically, the sink, the refrigerator, and the stove.
* https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/kitchen-triangle-b...
The total summed distance between those three appliances should (ideally) be in the range of 13-26 feet (4-8m); each side/edge of the triangle should ideally be in the 4-9 foot (1.5-3m) range.
Then each of the sink, the refrigerator, and stove should have have a certain minimum counter space around it:
The stove and sink distance is more important I think, as well of a place to hang towels close to the sink so you can quickly wash after touching meat or sticky stuff. Our current towel rack is off to the far end of the kitchen and causes a lot of walking around.
One thing I also keep in mind, but this is more cabinet placement, is the orchestration when setting the table or other interruptions during the cooking (eg: kids washing their hands). Ideally you don't want your spouse/kids to have to pass you when you are standing in front of a hot stove or cutting with a sharp knife. So move the plates, cutlery and stuff to the edges of the kitchen (and also take into account the dishwasher and place to store dirty dishes).
I like to consider how much people would have to pay me to spend a similar amount of time, and the cost would be much, much higher than €1000.
This is not an intuitive measure.
“We guesstimated this amount based on the assets the family owned and the incomes they reported.”
So owning a ridiculously expensive espresso machine is supposed to be a measure of the quality of food produced in a kitchen? No.
I have an electric steamer and rice cooker which I use a lot, and the quality of my food is excellent.
I understand a measure of nutrition is too far to be expect. But relevant to kitchen technology are CO2 production, energy efficiency. And these measures don’t need to be so granular. A multi-factor analysis on binary scale would be more informative and thoughtful than saying the dirt kitchen is $40/mo and Manhattan Penthouse kitchen is $7k/mo, and some other kitchen in India is 4K/mo?? Nonsense.
That means that if there are two households in India and USA, and both have an "income" of 1000 USD, their consumption is similar. However it's very likely that the Indian households has significantly less actual income because stuff in India is cheaper. This also means that for goods that cost almost the same around the world e.g. an iPhone would be more affordable for American household.
It really helps show that people are just people and highlight the disparity of their circumstances.
Nope - babies are still cute, and parents are still cooking amazing food all over the world! More of this.
Making my own food allows me to eat exactly what I want, in the right amount, made from the right ingredients. It's also more healthy. If you want to get all abstract about it, it's also about keeping a culture of food alive that I grew up with.
I suspect your experience as a digital nomand isn't quite representative, and it probably also has a lot to do with where you're from originally...
So even if you don’t cook often you’ll see 48” ranges, counter depth fridges, and custom cabinetry and islands in high end homes.
It’s not uncommon for a modern luxury kitchen to cost more than most homes across the country.
High end and custom is expensive.
None of them have places that outright lack kitchens, that would be strange. Few of them shop for groceries though - the majority use eg Amazon Fresh
Eating out has overhead that can easily exceed that of cooking, plus it's one block of time.
Eating out is especially time-wasting for snacks.
Food delivery reduces some of the overhead but introduces delay.
Plus, meals that you cook are more customizable. (Ghost and automated kitchens can solve that.)
How rewarding it is to see someone genuinely enjoy something you made.
Once you clear that second threshold, and especially if you have a family, it seems to me that most people prefer it over restaurant-centric eating. Also, if you’re used to prices in major tech hubs, it might surprise you how common it is that a full-time maid is much more affordable than eating out.
Additionally, just because you can afford to eat out every meal doesn't mean you wouldn't rather do other things with your money (e.g. save to retire early).
Of course, if your income is high enough you might not even care about that, but I don't think this website covers such incomes (the highest kitchens I can see are $10k/month) and at that level you can probably pay someone to cook for you.
> We want to show how people really live. It seemed natural to use photos as data so people can see for themselves what life looks like on different income levels. Dollar Street lets you visit many, many homes all over the world. Without travelling ... A team of photographers have documented over 264 homes in 50 countries so far, and the list is growing. In each home the photographer spends a day taking photos of up to 135 objects, like the family’s toothbrushes or favorite pair of shoes. All photos are then tagged (household function, family name and income) ... Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious or economic affiliations.
Video (2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw
That much gets you a house for you and your butler in the UK. And it's expensive here.
The metaphor in play is to “imagine the world as a street”
prepare to be amazed by what little you can get for $10k/month in NYC or SFBA
into the trash it goes