Platform about design and technology in the kitchen, home, and bathroom industry
There is one phrase or statement that I hear more and more often lately: “I can't cook, you know.” And it is not uttered with shame, no, rather with a kind of liberating pride. As if it has become a superfluous skill. An anachronism. Just like knowing phone numbers by heart or reading maps with a paper road map.
I understand it somewhere. Why would you still learn to cook when you can have a meal delivered to your home with one click, when your refrigerator keeps track of what's been used up by itself, when your AI recipe system gives suggestions based on your mood (yes, you can do that now), and your oven automatically knows how long to put the lasagna in? Indeed ... it all fits the zeitgeist of today. It's comfort, convenience, progress. But it is also... loss. Indeed: it is an enormous loss!
You see, we are massively losing how to cook. Real cooking. Not ‘cut open a package and stir for a moment’. But: binding a sauce by feeling, tasting if something is done, smelling if your spices are right, panic if something burns but persevere anyway. That cooking. And so I ask the uncomfortable question: what if soon no one will be able to do it? What will that mean for the kitchen industry?
Are we going to keep designing kitchens built on skills that are slowly disappearing? Will we still need five-burner gas stoves in ten years when no one knows what to do with five pans at once anymore? Should we continue to promote built-in steam ovens to people who don't even know what steaming is? Or will the kitchen become a kind of high-tech cockpit that automatically takes over everything and relegates the user to being a passenger?
And if the user will soon only have to swipe, scan or scroll, what will be left of the experience? Of the pride? Of that moment when you put something on the table and think: I made this myself. No artificial chef can beat that. The smell of melted butter, the hiss of onion in the pan ... you don't learn these things from an app, you have to feel them.
Maybe we as an industry need to do something with that. Maybe in addition to design, technology and innovation, we need to build back a little cooking base. Not in the equipment but in the story. The showroom. The positioning. Maybe a kitchen store should not just explain appliances, but teach the art of cooking again. Not just telling you what an oven can do, but why you would want to bake in the first place. And how that works without an app. Just by sight. By experience. By smell.
Organize not a product demo, but a pasta class. Not a discount on a blender, but a lesson in making broth. Because when we teach people to cook again, we also teach them the value of cooking again.
Or - even more radical - maybe it's time we dare to say it out loud: modern man is a cooking lay. And instead of hiding that under a layer of smart technology and voice control, we can say, “Don't worry, we'll help you get back on track.”
Because the truth is: those who don't cook don't know what they're missing. And those who never learn, will never be able to be proud of that homemade risotto that you went wrong three times, but which in the end... just worked. And that is the moment when a kitchen is right again.
How beautiful can kitchen life ever be again.
