Megan McArdle on the good and bad (mostly bad, IMO) of adding extra layers of technological sophistication to your kitchen appliances. If someone hasn’t already offered a hand-blender, can-opener, or soup tureen with Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth built-in, just wait a bit … it’s bound to happen.
I don’t think of myself as having Luddite tendencies, but I confess that when I see refrigerators with screens set into their doors, my first thought is: “Why?”
No, don’t tell me that you can stream music or look inside the refrigerator. I already have technology for that — respectively, my Amazon Echo and this app called “opening the door.” Neither costs the thousands of extra dollars I would have to pay to get my hands on a Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator. And if my music streamer breaks, I can replace it without calling an appliance repair company and spending a fortune on parts.
I have similar sensations about many of the technologies on offer in today’s appliances. Every major appliance manufacturer seems to be looking for a way to stick wi-fi into their products, for example. And I confess, I have occasionally fantasized about starting a pie cooking in my oven, sauntering to the other side of my 5,400-square-foot home for a dip in the pool, and being able to use my phone to turn down the heat on the pie after 10 minutes. Alas, in the trim 1,700-square-foot rowhouse I actually live in, I am never far enough from my kitchen to actually justify resorting to my smartphone rather than my feet.
We are at a curious moment in cooking technology. The last decade or so has probably introduced more technology potential into the kitchen than any previous decade except the 1930s. Sous vide, electric pressure cookers, fuzzy logic rice machines, induction cooktops, food processors that also cook, wi-fi controls, web connections … these things are now common enough for ordinary cooking enthusiasts to have at least heard of them, if not tried them. It is an era of enormous potential. And yet, that potential is frequently not realized, because we can’t actually figure out what to do with all our new toys.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that all of this new technology is useless. Far from it! I am an enthusiast for many of them. And yet, almost all these whiz-bang technologies fall prey, to some extent, to one of two problems. Either they are not actually very useful, or they are so spectacularly revolutionary that the average home cook can’t figure out what to do with them.
And this doesn’t even dip in to the awesomely terrible security issues of so many Internet-of-Things devices, creating new, wide vistas for Ransomware scumbags…
