In Defense of Kitchen Gadgets
18th March 2012
Megan McArdle articulates (much better than I could) her position (with which I agree) regarding certain aspects of modern life.
A good kitchen gadget lowers the marginal cost, in time or money, of producing good food. More than occasionally, they also produce better food than you can do unassisted. Toasters make better toast than your oven does. Food processors make better pie crust than tediously fooling with two forks or a pastry blender while your fat gets warm. Genoise can fail on even the most expert cook, but the Thermomix method is basically foolproof–and produces a product just as good as the old hand method.
And that’s what progress is all about: Getting machines to do the boring and tedious parts of a process, so that humans can spend more time on the interesting and fun parts, and so that we get a final result that as many people as possible can afford.