But how shall we get our food into our dining-rooms?
It will be delivered, cooked, in shining aluminium receptacles hot and steaming, cold and fresh—all this has been done. And it and its dishes, will go away again, tight-closed, leaving you to brush up the crumbs and fold the tablecloth. If you want your own elaborate sets of china enough to wash dishes, that is quite permissible, a butler's pantry will take care of that.
There is no more reason why a civilized family should cook its own food in its own kitchen than kill its own pig in its own backyard.
Then rises the pathetic cry about not liking it. Of course some people won't like it. Some people never like any new way of doing things. Food habits are proverbially hard to change.
But I can tell you who will like it—that is the woman who is tired of planning meals, tired of ordering meals, tired of managing servants, or tired—deadly tired—of her own cooking.
And one generation of children, growIng up in kitchenless homes, eating food that is prepared by trained experts and not by "greenhorns," used to science and art in the food supply instead of affection and ignorance—they will like it.
We like what we are used to, and if we have been used to it for a thousand years we like it more intensely. But that proves nothing at all except that we are used to it. It does not prove the thing is good for us—nor that we can not get used to something better and like that, in course of time, just as devotedly. One would think, observing the attitude of most of us toward any proposed change, that so far we had never changed at all.
But with all history behind us; with that long, long flight of little steps we took so many centuries to climb, and then, closer, the swiftly heightening large steps we have been taking in these later years ever more swiftly; what then accounts for our always clinging so desperately to the one behind, and resisting so furiously being forced up one more!
It is like the old story of the liberal-minded Grandma and the combination suit. She visited her daughter in New York, resolved to keep up with Progress.
They took her to hear Ignatius Donnelly with his Baconian theory;
Ingersoll hammering at Moses, and Jenness-Miller with her Reformed
Clothes for Women.