Hearthbroken: Chapter Four (bonus chapter this week)

Embers in the Dark: The Cost of Untended Flames

“We have not inherited the Earth from our ancestors; we are borrowing it from our children.” — Native American proverb (often attributed to the Haudenosaunee)

The kitchen was pristine, all gleaming stainless steel and spotless countertops. As I walked the production floor of my fermented food company, watching workers in hairnets efficiently pack sauerkraut into plastic pouches, a strange irony struck me. Here I was, scaling up traditional foods that women had been making in their homes for generations, while my own kitchen sat dark and quiet. The very wisdom I’d learned from grandmothers in humble kitchens around the world was being repackaged into a commercial product, and something profound was being lost in translation.

For decades, I straddled two worlds in the food industry, one ancient and intimate, the other modern and industrial. At age 16, I was waiting tables in a tiny café when the cook bailed and I was tapped to pitch in. I was hooked – the kitchen grabbed me and never let go. Later in my 20’s I fell hard for the traditional kitchens I visited around the world, learning the ropes from wizened elders, watching their hands coax simple ingredients into meals that had nourished their kin for ages. More than kitchens, these were ‘hearths,’ living classrooms where every dish wove heritage into the everyday.

Inspired by those hearths, I launched a fermented food company with what I thought was a noble mission: to preserve and share their ancient wisdom by making traditional foods more accessible to modern families. What I didn’t understand then was the contradictory nature of my endeavor. By commercializing these food traditions, I was inadvertently contributing to their erosion. In some sense, the process of making these foods “efficient” and “marketable” stripped away the living context, the human connection that gave them their deepest value.

From Flame to Factory

Picture a traditional kitchen where the act of making sauerkraut is an intimate dance of generations. Grandmother guides small hands as her grandchild learns to slice cabbage, teaching not just knife skills but patience and respect for sharp tools. Tune into the background hum of clanging pots and utensils as this kitchen comes alive with the sounds of stories passed down through time, tales of harvests past and family lore floating amid the crisp scent of fresh cabbage. Together, Grandmother and child pack the salted shreds into crocks, pressing down with hands that connect them to countless ancestors who performed these same motions. The fermentation unfolds in its own time, teaching lessons about timing and natural rhythms. When ready, jars are shared with neighbors, each one holding not just probiotic super food but also the invisible threads that weave a community together. As one batch ends, another begins, marking the seasons in an ancient cycle of abundance and preservation.

The industrial facility where my company made sauerkraut was a very different setting. Here, giant stainless steel machines digested truckloads of cabbage, their mechanical teeth precisely calibrated to create uniform shreds. Salt was measured not by practiced hands but by automated dispensers programmed to the tenth of a gram. In climate-controlled fermentation cellars the size of Olympic pools, bacteria performed their primordial dance under the watchful eyes of digital sensors. Workers in sterile gear monitored readings and adjusted dials, their connection to the process mediated by strict operating procedures. The end product was consistent, safe and efficient, everything modern commerce demanded. Millions of identical jars rolled off the line, each one perfect, standardized — and somehow incomplete.

Expansion at this level almost always means sacrificing the very things that once made this process sacred: the human connection, the generational wisdom, the community ties, the seasonal rhythms that give sauerkraut and other fermented foods their deepest nourishment.

During my years in the food business, I witnessed a major shift in how we think about domestic skills. What was once considered essential knowledge, making a simple pot of soup, baking a loaf of bread or canning vegetables as a way to preserve the harvest, were now quaint hobbies for the privileged few with spare time. I saw this most clearly in the eyes of young women visiting my farmers’ market stands. They’d pick up a jar of sauerkraut with a mixture of curiosity and intimidation, admitting they wouldn’t know where to begin making their own. Their great-grandmothers would have seen this as plain know-how, as basic as tying a shoe. Now it’s specialized knowledge, purchased rather than learned or passed down to our kids.

This pattern repeats across every domain once governed by the hearth. Children who might have learned patience and responsibility by helping care for younger siblings or assisting mom in the kitchen are instead entertained by screens. The complex social choreography of multi-generational households has been replaced by age-segregated care facilities. The natural rhythms of domestic life, cooking, cleaning, mending and tending have been broken into discrete services to be purchased as needed.

The market promises ease and speed, but it can’t offer the deeper benefits of domestic work: the sense of confidence that comes from knowing how to care for yourself and others, the bonds that develop when generations work together, the cultural wisdom woven into those everyday tasks.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we should all haul our laundry down to the river or cook every meal from scratch. My point is, that although convenience has its place, when it becomes the default, something vital slips away.

Love Letter to the Hearth

As my fermented food company grew, I found myself caught in a deepening paradox. By day, I translated ancient traditions into the language of industry, putting them through the paces of scale and profit margins. By night, I turned to the joy of developing recipes for my cookbook but soon realized that what I was really savoring was a way of life eroded by the machinery of progress.

In the kitchens where I first learned to ferment, the practice was never simply a means to an end. Fermentation was a slow type of magic requiring patience and trust. A process that couldn’t be rushed. Just as these ancestral microbes need time to do their work, so do people, relationships and communities. My relationship with cooking and fermentation taught me that real sustenance doesn’t come from bending nature to our will but from creating the right conditions for life to thrive.

These truths grew more precious — and more elusive as we expanded. Efficiency demanded that we exchange the hand for the machine, the relational for the transactional and the intimate for the standardized. The cookbook became my way of holding onto the “why” of fermentation and the lessons and wisdom embedded in its rhythms. It was a love letter to the hearths of old, where survival danced with craft and where necessity birthed some of the world’s first culinary traditions. This knowledge, so natural to our ancestors, feels radical in today’s world, a world that could benefit more than ever from its lessons.

The Untended Flame

Walk into most homes today, mine too some days, and a microwave’s ping has overtaken the gentle murmur of a slow simmer and the most common instructions are, “peel back film to vent.”

We might be raising the first generation who never gets the chance to experience the joy of turning raw ingredients into something delicious and healthy. Kids who may never marvel at the transformation of milk into cheese, of cabbage into kimchi or flour into bread. They may never know the pride that comes from offering a loved one something crafted with their own hands.

The untended hearth leaves a void far deeper than the absence of a home-cooked meal. It robs us of the opportunities for what sociologists call idle parenting, those unscripted, happy collisions of talk and togetherness sparked by cooking, kneading, chopping and scrubbing side by side. When shared meals shrink to rushed bites between to-dos, we miss out on mentorship and bonding. We lose the hearth as a site of both nourishment and connection, a place where families grow not just in size, but in soul.

When I think about the consequences of our retreat from the hearth, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a pediatrician friend who’s been practicing for over thirty years. “The changes I’ve seen in children’s health are striking,” she told me. “It’s not scraped knees anymore. Allergies are climbing, asthma is harsher and new autoimmune cases on the rise, things like anxiety and depression are hitting young kids, unthinkable when I started.” Her observation points to a troubling reality: as we’ve outsourced the work of the hearth to the market economy, we’ve inadvertently created conditions that undermine both our physical and mental wellbeing.

The numbers paint a stark picture. One in five American children is now clinically obese, a condition that was relatively rare just a generation ago. When a large portion of our meals come from drive-throughs and the prepared food aisle, we’re not just losing the nutritional wisdom of home cooking; we’re actively programming young palates to prefer processed foods engineered for maximum appeal rather than nourishment.

But the impacts run far deeper than nutrition. Today’s children are experiencing heartbreaking levels of anxiety and depression — 37% of adolescents report persistent feelings of hopelessness or sadness, while 9.4% receive clinical anxiety diagnoses. These statistics become less surprising when we consider how the disappearance of regular family meals has eliminated crucial opportunities for emotional connection and support. Research consistently shows that children who regularly share family meals demonstrate better emotional regulation, higher self-esteem and greater resilience in facing life’s challenges.

The effects ripple through every generation. Among mothers, 47% report finding parenting stressful all or most of the time, a statistic that reflects both the isolation of modern parenthood and the crushing pressure of trying to balance market economy demands with family care. Without the support systems and shared wisdom that once flowed naturally through multi-generational households, many parents feel overwhelmed and ill-equipped.

Even our elders bear the burden of the untended hearth. With 27% of Americans over 65 living alone, many seniors find themselves cut off from the rituals of family life that once gave their later years purpose and meaning. The traditional role of grandparents as wisdom-keepers and caregiving partners has largely disappeared, replaced by a model that often leaves them feeling superfluous or burdensome.

Perhaps most concerning is how these individual struggles compound at the societal level. The erosion of domestic knowledge and the devaluation of caregiving work have created what sociologists call a “care deficit,” the growing gap between society’s needs for nurturing and our capacity to provide it. One glaring example is how a growing number of children are arriving at kindergarten without strong social-emotional foundations. According to a 2022 national survey, nearly half of kindergarten teachers reported that children’s ability to manage emotions and get along with peers has declined significantly in recent years, making it harder for them to learn and participate in school activities. If we’re missing the mark from the start, how can we expect them to grow into resilient adults who can navigate life with clarity and courage in an increasingly complex world?

The Flickering Flame

Most of us sense the problems but feel at a loss when it comes to realistic solutions. The tension in our culture is palpable. Young families who long for a sustainable home life find themselves colliding with the unforgiving demands of economic survival. Two incomes are no longer a luxury — for many they’re required just to keep food on the table.

In 2019, a report from Child Care Aware of America revealed that the average cost of childcare in the United States exceeded $11,000 per year for just one child. In regions like the Bay Area in Northern California, this figure soars to $15,000 or more and that’s if you’re lucky enough to find a spot for your child. For families with multiple children, these expenses compound rapidly, forcing many parents into a relentless cycle: working to afford the very care that enables them to work. It’s a loop that feels both absurd and inescapable.

The prospect of one parent stepping out of the workforce to tend to the hearth, once a common arrangement, now feels almost inconceivable for many families. And for those who do entertain the idea, the economic and social risks can be daunting, especially for women.

At the heart of this struggle is a seductive but deeply flawed promise: the myth of having it all. For decades, women have been sold the idea that they can, and should, be everything to everyone. In 1978, even perfume companies joined the chorus. Enjoli, marketed as “the eight-hour fragrance for the 24-hour woman,” featured a jingle that captured the era’s glossy ideal. We watched with amused admiration as the Enjoli woman effortlessly transitioned from the boardroom to the kitchen to the bedroom, singing, “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never, never, never let you forget you’re a man…” But this ideal has proven to be less a vision of empowerment and more a cruel illusion, one that stretches women too thin and leaves families and society frayed.

I watched my single mother navigate this balancing act firsthand. Even with the support of her parents, she struggled to find equilibrium. Hers was the first generation to attempt full-time roles in both the public and domestic spheres —without any meaningful change in support. At first, I think it felt liberating. But as the demands mounted, that liberation gave way to an internalized sense of failure. The constant push and pull took a toll, not just on her, but on those around her. I remember the exhaustion in her eyes at the end of long days, the weight of trying to be everything to everyone. She was part of a generation that paved the way for progress, but paid an exorbitant price for it.

The tragic irony is that in our quest to improve our lives, we’ve created a world that leaves us more depleted, more disconnected and ultimately less capable of caring for ourselves and one another. The market might offer endless products and services, but it cannot replicate the deep nourishment that flows from a well-tended hearth.

Rekindling the Sacred Flame

The industrialization of home life has extracted a devastating toll on our collective wellbeing, from the loss of ancestral wisdom to poor health outcomes, to the fraying of our most vital human connections. As families navigate the crushing demands of the two-income economy, the necessary work of the hearth, once the cornerstone of human flourishing, has been reduced to a series of transactions, leaving a deep and unnamable emptiness in its place.

Twenty years into the digital revolution, we find ourselves on the edge of another seismic shift: the AI revolution, a force as paradigm-changing as it is potentially perilous. It seems to me that instead of fearing what lies ahead, we’d do better to collectively figure out how to shape this technology to serve rather than unravel us.

I offer no tidy answers, only an elder’s simple conviction: our survival depends on finding our way home. Not to what once was, but to what has always mattered. Care and connection are the real currencies of human flourishing.

Note to readers: Looking for sources and deeper listening? See Footnotes by the Fire: Sources + Podcast Companion