Toucan argues that modern vertical wood-slat paneling and live-edge tables are ubiquitous because they minimize labor and material costs

I find these slab tables are so incredibly ugly. The one in the photo above is actually one of the best possible examples you'll find, most are way uglier. The live edge thing is just an excuse not to finish the edges properly. Seriously have you sat at one of these tables before? First of all, the live edge often means the edges aren't flat, which is a nightmare for placing things like cutlery or cups near the edge. And the fact that the sides of the table weave in and out mean that people seated around the table don't line up properly, so when you are on the long edge and look down your view is blocked. It's atrocious. Seriously, look at image #4 and tell me this edge makes any sense for a piece of functional furniture.

And the warping is insane on these things. The wood is usually not dried properly, leading to warping over time. Since such a large piece of wood is used, many different parts of the tree are in that single slab top, of different densities and grain orientations, which exacerbates the problem. And then to counteract this, most of the people who make these tables drill in big steel rails under the bottom of the table, which adds an insane amount of weight, and also doesn't truly solve the problem, since all that stiffness prevents natural contraction and expansion and stresses out the wood itself.

Also the epoxy resin that people like to use is such a horrible finish for tables. Way too soft and the scratches add up quickly. And again it's dimensionally stable, but the wood isn't. And horrible VOCs. Makes the table smell like shit. You want me to dine on that?

Don't get me started on the epoxy infills people like to do, or the blue glass "river" stuff. Oh sure yeah that is totally gonna have the same thermal behavior as the wood! Absolutely no cracks, no sir.

And my god these tables are so heavy. Thick slabs of wood + epoxy + steel means you need a forklift to move these things. Totally absurd. Forget rearranging the dining room.

I'm not saying these tables can't be done properly but they are visually stunning leading to most people who make them seeming to pick up the idea from youtube, with all the woodworking skills you would expect from a beginner.

But they sell for so much! Muh expensive black walnut! Muh expensive white oak! Did you know that there are only two colors of wood available to American consumers, black walnut and white oak? And that the only determining price of a table is the material costs? Look how much I spent on this slab of wood and how little on the labor!

Part of the brutish look of these tables comes from, of course, the utter lack of finishing, let alone any hand tools or finesse or detail work. It's all just machine tools hacking the wood apart and gluing or bolting it together. Forget joinery, forget planing, we're ditching curves, it's straight lines from here to woodworking hell. Oh yeah this beautiful slab? We're going to sand it and smush up the surface. What a joke. Ugly as shit.

These live edge tables are totally synonymous with Millennial American aesthetics: procurement decisions made by monomaniacal monodimensional end-consumers unmoored from historical style deciding to spec-maxx solely on the basis of social media trends, supplied by philistine gearhead makers with little training and zero apprenticeship relying on machine tools to compensate for lack of handworking skills and competing with each other for social media views (i.e. distribution i.e. customers) on the basis of flashy stunts rather than serious craftsmanship. Blunt, crude, meretricious, gauche, slop.

You see it everywhere now. Muh wagyu burger!! Muh cashmere sweater!! Muh genuine leather!!