Can smart kitchen devices make you a better cook?
IN THE kitchen of the future, it was time to make some salmon, and the reporter of the present day - that’s me - had several choices. I could put it in my smart pan, which would notify me via cellphone alert when it had reached the precise temperature - 375 degrees Fahrenheit - at which the fish should be cooked, and when to put it in the pan, and when to flip it, too.
Or I could cook it in my smart grill, selecting the salmon function in an app for the device. I’d set the fish’s interior temperature to “buttery soft” (104 degrees), close the lid and never have to check on the food because the grill would bring it up to the right temperature.
Or I could simply put the salmon on a pan and pop it into my smart oven, where the camera inside would recognise that it was salmon, and the oven would ask me how well done I prefer. Then I’d go sit on my couch and drink a glass of wine while I monitored the salmon’s progress from my phone, which would stream live video of the fish turning opaque and sizzling in its juices.
When I turned my dumb kitchen into a smart one, cooking using only countertop appliances that were connected to my phone via WiFi or Bluetooth, I anticipated a future where I could come home from work, pop my food into my various devices, and let the algorithms take it from there while I kicked up my feet.
It didn’t exactly work that way. Picture instead: Me, standing in my kitchen, flipping among nearly a dozen apps, each of them sending me various alerts for temperature and time. Individually, many of the devices did make my life a little easier. Together? The smart kitchen still has some learning to do.
“We’re very quickly approaching the time when every object, whether it’s an oven or a microwave, is connected to the Internet by default,” said Linden Tibbets, chief executive of IFTTT, a technology company that works to unite apps and services. Before long, every kitchen will be a smart kitchen. And that could forever change the way we live.
“All the ways that we produce and distribute and manufacture and shop for food were produced by industrialisation,” said Sarah Smith, research director at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, California, think tank. “The new era of intelligent objects, if it does transform things just as much, that will be very big change.”
That’s because whenever we encode automation or artificial intelligence into a device, we also encode it with our values. Often, the primary value is convenience, but “that efficiency . . . is expanding to include other values,” such as flavour, Smith said. The smart kitchen isn’t just about making your life easier; the other goal is to teach you to be a better cook. — Washington Post
All the ways that we produce and distribute and manufacture and shop for food were produced by industrialisation. The new era of intelligent objects, if it does transform things just as much, that will be very big change. — Sarah Smith, research director at the Institute for the Future