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The aesthetics of the kitchen are important and need to be conducive to cooking but there are so many conflicts that affect primarily women and their ability to cook on a consistent basis;role conflicts, lack of cooking education, perfectionism to name a few. As a therapist and a "celebrity home chef", I actually founded "Take Back the Kitchen" which provides workshops and individual sessions to help women overcome their psychological and practical obstacles to cooking. We have lost the kitchen as the hearth of the home concept and we need to bring it back for health reasons and to bring the family back together! www.takebackthekitchen.blogspot.com

Regarding white flour in kitchens other than in America, I recall the heartbreaking scene in Olmi's classic film about 19th century tenant farmers in Italy: Tree of the Wooden Clogs. The wife of an impoverished tenant farmer gives birth yet again (her 8th??) and the doctor who visits her because she is too weak to resume her normal duties prescribes white bread, which was apparently a lot more expensive than the usual dark peasant bread. It's an image that's stayed with me. How foolish!

I understand there was a craze in the late 19th century-early 20th to paint kitchens apple-green. Research had shown apple-green had a calming effect on [always-potentially-hysterical] housewives(!)

This is also how many hospitals came to be painted apple-green.

In Chicago, the condo boom has given us lots of open kitchens. It's especially interesting when older apartments are gutted and the kitchen is move from the back of the property to the center. I have a kind of standard issue "stainless and granite" situation adjacent to the living area but really am dreaming of something more grand in my future.

It has become the central room for my family. Both my kids prefer to do their homework at the kitchen island table -smelling the dinner as it cooks on the stove or in the oven.

When we enter our house - the kitchen is the first room we go to - to wash hands, get a glass of water, check the calendar, chat - everything; it is the grand central station of the urban home.

Kitchen is the heart of the house, I love kitchens, I love parties where everyone is hanging out in the kitchen. I loathe my current one, really needs to be gutted and redone, but I make do. I want my new one to have a couch in it. Why not?

I spend most of my time in our apartment's kitchen. I cook there (of course) and read, eat, play with the cats, exercise, work on projects. I try to keep it as tidy as possible.

Oh and i love all my utensils, too - prefer iron skillets and old revere ware to what is trendy, of course with exception of le creuset... cuisinart is broken, not sure i need to replace it!

I love my kitchen - it's kinda homely but very functional. I grew up with a kitchen big enough to fit a typical Manhattan 1BR apt. with room to spare but I learned to cook more efficiently in a small space. It's virtually the same kitchen as that of the chalet I lived in as an au pair in the Alps a zillion years ago - including the pass-through - this family were the summer neighbors of Picasso in the cote d'azur - with one of his lithos in the chalet. So I have never since been impressed by a fancified kitchen with requisite viking stove (so often a pretension of people who can't even cook!!). That kitchen had butane or propane tanks for gas and a little flint thing to light the burners every time. I learned how to use space and to love cooking and not see it as a big chore. Much less messy this way. In my mother's kitchen you just made a mess and moved on and by the time you were finished it was a nightmare to have to clean up! I have lived in NY apts with really depressing kitchens, with bad stoves, no circulating air or light - or really zero space - so I love the one I have now. We often had big dinners, (in either dining room or breakfast room in feeling) so I love that and miss it in NY. I became a food zealot when I had a scary bone scan and refused to take drugs - I am happy to report to all who worry that I had a 2nd bone scan 2 years later and I have reversed my bone loss without drugs. Kitchens are important!