Last time you moved house, did the cooker join the rest of your furniture on the removal van? Or, if you were moving into your first home, was one of your first tasks (along with arranging for utility connections in your name) to go out & buy a new cooker?
My guess is not, not in this age of fitted kitchens. You may well have expected - & found – a whole panoply of appliances, included in the purchase price or rent, ready & waiting: washing machine, tumble drier, fridge, freezer & dishwasher. Though I have known people who got a nasty shock on moving-in day, when they found that the vendor had considered those fittings not so fixed after all & had driven off with them.
Laura Sandys, Conservative MP for Thanet South, claimed last week that as many of 80% of families in her constituency have no cooker, other than a microwave.
Pondering how this could be, I remembered my consternation when I heard that the shared flats in the University halls of residence were not, generally, equipped with cookers; students who wanted to cater for themselves had only microwaves, electric kettles & maybe a toaster or sandwich-maker of their own. Fire risk was a major factor behind this policy.
Ms Sandys did specify that the 80% figure applies only to families living in private rented accommodation in some neighbourhoods, so I suspect that a similar concern often lies behind the landlord’s reluctance to provide a cooker or even, to make assurance doubly sure, the requisite connections to gas or sockets for electricity supply.
Cooking appliances were the main source of ignition in over half of all accidental dwelling fires in 2010-11 according to the Department of Communities & local Government statistics, & according to FireSafe seven thousand people are injured in kitchen fires each year, and that doesn’t include the people who are killed.
Nor would a landlord want to face the risk of finding that the tenant has sold the cooker to solve an emergency cash flow problem.
It's a long time since the Population Census last asked households if their accommodation tincluded a kitchen of their own, but when it did it was taken for granted that a kitchen included a cooker. Perhaps questions about cooking facilities need now to be added to government household social surveys
It is possible to cook whole meals from scratch in a microwave – I have at least one such cookery book on my shelves. But it seems a desperately fiddly business, one which I never really tried. Meanwhile the new compulsory school cookery lessons certainly ought to take account of the circumstances in which children live, & pay attention to lessons in how to use a microwave to cook simple things such as vegetables.
Links
[PDF] Fire Statistics Great Britain, 2010 – 2011
Derbyshire Fire & rescue Service: In the kitchen
Fires in the kitchen
[PDF]US National Fire Protection Association: Home Fires Involving Cooking Equipment
National Chip Week
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