10. Future homes would have no need for kitchens, with food delivered by pneumatic tubes from a centralized preparation center upon order
In 1925, in a speculative report detailing conditions in Berlin from ten years in the future, Inventions Magazine boldly predicted the end to home cooking. It claimed that, rather than being prepared at home, food would instead be sent upon order en masse to households. However, not merely a home delivery service, “whizzing at mile-a-minute speed through pneumatic tubes far beneath the streets” would be “thermos bottles each containing part of some housewife’s meal.”
Contending that meals would be selected from “a 300-page menu book distributed to each apartment house and home within a radius of ten blocks of the gigantic central kitchen”, orders would be placed for a specific time and prepared in “huge galvanized troughs and pots”. A vast network of said tubes would subsequently deliver the orders, eliminating the need for the very existence of kitchens in the future home. Although not lacking in foresight, it must be noted that there has been at least some accuracy in the outlandish prediction. Until closure in early 2011 a McDonald’s restaurant in Edina, Minnesota, operated what it claimed to be the “world’s only pneumatic air drive-thru” wherein ordered food was sent via pneumatic tubes from a strip-mall kitchen to the drive-through located in the middle of the parking lot. Equally, despite lacking the pneumatic tube aspects of food delivery, the growth of home-delivered takeout in recent decades mirrors the prediction of a decline in home cooking.