Kitchens of the future

Sous-vide cooking. Internet-connected refrigerators. Remote thermometers that send text messages about your food. All of these innovations promise new ways to work in the kitchen. Some are more revolutionary than others, but how much do they really change how we cook? Digital Trends takes a look at kitchen evolution and discovers that the more kitchens change, the more they stay the same. 

The lengthy article traces important milestones in home cooking, from using precise measurements (thanks to Fannie Farmer’s 1896 cookbook) to the advent of the microwave to the modern trend of having “smart” appliances. When the microwave oven was first introduced, people thought it would utterly transform the way people cooked. What it actually did was changed the way we reheated leftovers (and maybe the way we melted chocolate).

Current innovations focus on connectivity. Appliances are communicating with each other, monitoring the food that is in them, and making adjustments without the need for human input. Some of the products seem superfluous, although the market hasn’t yet sorted itself out enough to find which applications will have staying power. And as we’ve recently seen in the denial of service attacks that took down major internet sites, all of this communication ability carries some risk. 

Forward thinkers have long predicted that one day the kitchen will do all the work for us, ala The Jetsons and other futuristic cartoons. None of these predictions has come to fruition. Maybe some people would appreciate just being able to grab a pill that will provide all their nutrients, but others still want to cook. “Cooking has been under every pressure you can imagine,” says Laura Shapiro, author of Something from the Oven. “The freezer didn’t kill it, and the microwave didn’t kill, and not having time didn’t kill it. Changing views of even what constitutes dinner didn’t kill it, all the changing populations – we still cook.”