Dear Trivian, The case for home-cooked homes

Dear Trivian,

How glad I am to be writing to you again! My hours of daydreaming vanished before my eyes. Gobbled up they where by French admin, homestead issues, cooking duty. Slipped between my fingers. It’s next to impossible to get some honest thinking donewhen you have constant tiny tasks floating around you, nagging you for attention.

(Note that I lack children, a real job or other real time-eating occupations actual people complain about)

So coming back to what you said, of course you can’t ask everyone to leave in “full nature immersion”, taking cold showers and cooking on the wood stove. Most people will choose the comfy passive house with tons of gadgets instead of the homestead where cold is cold and fog gets in your bedroom.

(OK, fog technically can’t be in your bedroom I think, the difference in temperature would be too high.)

On the other hand, most people will also choose comfy McDonalds’ over cooking for themselves. I am weary of making an actual comparison here between modern house design and Mcdonalds. On a scale from zero to McNuggets, Passive Houses and other green gadget place honorably, in my opinion, somewhere in the middle.

The real bad guy is the real estate agency low quality mean dark ugly piece of residential offering you get all over the place now. It boasts a couple of gadgets but they’re mosty bullshit, and it does get some energy efficiency, yet cancels that out with low quality work and materials and high overall carbon footprint.

So say those are the McNuggets. And eco-homes in Archdaily are those restaurant dishes where the eggs come in a tube and they put gold bits on top. Now let’s get to real food.

Cooking for yourself is healthy because you avoid the bad crap they put in as preservatives. It’s also eco-conscious, because you’re having better source management over your ingredients. It’s cheaper of course, though not as cheap as buying those horrid chicken-soy nuggets you put in the microwave.

I knew a guy once whose diet consisted entirely of those boxes of nuggets. He was tall and thin and anxious. He didn’t seem to be lacking money and seemed content with his choice. I think about that sometimes.

Now, well designed low-tech homes can have the same benefit as cooking and I dare bring arguments:

Healthy, because of the hormetic stress in my last letter ( which you can read here), but also because of the biophilic element (having nature around brings joy and serenity and all that). Not to mention the nasty volatile organic compounds you can mostly avoid if you take care.

Eco-conscious, because most of the crap gadgets on the market are in no way helping the planet. A de-escalation of our consumer trends would be so much more ethical and green.

Cheaper, for the obvious reasons. And for less obvious ones like low maintenance and resilience by design.

So on the one hand you have the cheapest low quality the market can offer without breaking the rules. On the other you have the cool guys and their green-washed design no one can actually afford. In the middle rest the residential architecture that is actually trying.

All of these choices are somehow oblivious of the end-user. What about stepping outside of the scale altogether and enjoy a home-cooked home?

I don’t mean we all should start building our homes ourselves like we’re all Laura Ingalls in the Prairie House without the pony tails. Cooking for oneself is something I see as simply getting invested in the actual process. Carefully choosing the ingredients and not letting someone elses priorities and economies imposed on the content of your plate.

Taking the precious time we all lack and devote it to mindful thought. Cherishing the result.

And salting it to taste.

-

I’m in the mood for a cheeseburger now..

As always yours my furry friend,

Jo

Originally published at https://jopetroni.substack.com on January 14, 2022.