Around midnight last night, it occurred to me that all my life I have accepted the premise of kitchen cabinets without questioning it. Allow me to state the partially obvious.
There is one room in most homes -- the kitchen -- in which a special type of furniture is installed. This furniture seems almost to grow from the walls, and in most cases completely obscures the walls. In other rooms, furniture can be moved around. In the kitchen, furniture is almost completely fixed. The length and uniformity of the furniture creates long stretches of what people call "counter space." People covet this counter space. Entire homes are bought and sold based on its presence or lack thereof. The blocky area underneath the counter is used for storage, and is equally coveted. To me, these structures look like enormous, corpulent robot stomachs that are ever-encroaching upon human space. They are made from not-wood. They are not sincere. They mean to strangle us.
It wasn't always like this. Originally, kitchens had tables and individualized pieces of actual furniture. Then, around the turn of the 20th century, people began to invent and market things like the hoosier cabinet:
Had humanity stopped at the hoosier cabinet, things might have been different. Instead, industrialization revved up, organizational psychologists started yammering about efficiency, and the next thing we know, our kitchens are bloated with dull, standardized surfaces.
This is bad for our souls. Which is why, the first chance we get, we should rip out the corpulent robot stomachs and take back our kitchens. John Thorne, writer of the Simple Cooking newsletter, did it (scroll down to 1997). After you've done it, go find a piece of furniture you actually care about--try the flea market--and let it provide a more personalized home to your boxes of cereal.
Oh yeah: also around midnight last night, I briefly thought I had invented the brilliant concept of sea water ice cream. Turns out, the Japanese beat me to it. Selah.