Elf Sternberg

There is also the issue of Urban Living.

If you live in a small apartment, you have next to no kitchen (by tradition & design; more on that below). So, storing ingredients, let alone cooking, becomes something of a space issue. And that's before we even consider time.

Most people who live in urban areas will have small apartments. Only the wealthy living in urban areas will have large domiciles, and neither time nor space nor expense are an issue for them, ever.


It's been this way for quite a long time, actually. People living in cities have always had to eat out, especially pre-electricity/pre-gas. How would you cook in an apartment, pre-20^th-Century? Can't really use a wood stove like out in the country — fire hazard, much?

In Ancient Rome, nobody had kitchens in their apartments. (Oh, the well-off did, but then, they didn't have an apartment so much as a city-house. And they also had slaves to do the cooking.) Nope, the average Ancient Roman ate out, at one of the numerous food vendors. They weren't what we'd consider restaurants; there might be stools at a counter that one could sit on. And the food was affordable, since the vendors made their money off of volume.

And, again, all of this out of practicality: nobody in Ancient Rome wanted one of the 5-story apartment buildings going up in flames. (And, yes, the Ancient Romans had 5-story and 6-story buildings.)


[Information about past living & eating habits courtesy of former-Python, Terry Jones … specifically, one of the BBC programs he did on life in Ancient civilizations.]