Koo koo ka choo okra Aunt Beru

It's that overabundance of okra again that's got me jealous of Luke Skywalker's Aunt Beru. Sure, she was married to a moisture farmer, and lived on the dusty planet of Tatooine. But, she got to live in that fab earth-sheltered desert dome home with the totally futuristic kitchen! It was Star Wars (1977). We didn't have microwave ovens or food processors back millions of years ago in a galaxy far, far away. We had electric Fry Baby Juniors and harvest gold crockpots. George Lukas could have freeze-framed the whole galactic saga right then. I was completely in awe watching Aunt Beru stuff weird vegetables into her streamlined kitchen appliance. That weird vegetable looked a lot like okra. Jawas probably live on okra, and fight over it like mutant Tasmanian devils.


Things went badly for Beru and Uncle Owen, I'm sad to report. Imperial Storm Troopers torched her sci fi home after Luke Skywalker went off to pal around with C3PO.


What can Aunt Beru's kitchen teach me about an efficient home? Closer to my own millennium, in 1923 Le Corbusier described a house thus:


A house is a machine for living in. Baths, sun, hot-water, cold-water, warmth at will, conservation of food, hygiene, beauty in a sense of good proportion. An armchair is a machine for sitting in and so on.

Did Aunt Beru empty the dregs from her cutting-edge okra processor into a worm bin? How did Tatooinians deal with waste? It seems to me that efficient home would provide for reduction and recycling of waste. If it can be compacted and reused at home, why transport it to the landfill? Can the house also be a machine for reducing waste?

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder