Ready-made tortellini freshly bought from
the supermarket continue to be on the
list of favorites of Swiss consumers. (1)
This suggests that the ripping of the dish’s
plastic foil after a long 4 minutes wait to
be heated up by the microwave, has not
lost its appeal. Dishes like this are cheap,
comfortable and convenient. When buying it
you imagine yourself already on your couch
indulging yourself in comfort and easyness.
And certainly nobody imagines the many
kilometers of the ingredients and the many
mechanical «hands» it has passed until
arriving in one’s stomach. Convenience food
suggests a kitchen that is easy, that probably
has a microwave as heating it up in a pan
seems impracticable.
The appearance of kitchen helper’s like the
microwave have opened up new freedoms
that would not have been possible in a preindustrialist
household and then respectively
a society. One could argue that it enabled
single-households. This somehow evokes
the image of a supersmall, super basic
mini-kitchen, but the kitchen these tortellini
could be prepared in could also be a modern
«Wohnküche». Where you lean against the
kitchen island that opens to a vast livingworking-
being space while you wait for the
longed-for beep of your wave-machine that
is just one out of a number of little helpers of
which many you for sure have never touched
to prepare something.
As mentioned in a previous essay, the kitchen
re-turned to be the heart of your home, but
is more expensive and expansive than ever
before. It is the shiny background for a smallscale
spectacle in a neoliberal system that
turned a the kitchen into an object of desire.
The changes the microwave and its fellow
helpers introduced were drastic. Whereas
dishwasher and co. helped to reduce work
(or just created a different type of work) the
microwave changed what food could be.
Today, our kitchens are filled with more and
more helping device while the microwave
polarizes (it is blamed for «killing vitamins»).
The kitchens are upgraded with Combi-
Steamer, induction woks, Teppan-Yaki-Grilss
and built-in coffee machines. (2) These
machines often account for more than half of
the total price today. But they also enable a
totally different lifestyle and preparation of
food.
Also more and more multimedia elements are
introduced. With this, the kitchen is turning
into the centre of controll and communication
in a networked house, where all medias meet.
The idea is old: As early as the sixties, the
woman of the world fried with radio (image 3).
(1) - https://www.migros.ch/de.html
(2) - Knoepfli, Adrian. Coole Küchen : Kochen ist Lifestyle, in: Hochparterre : Zeitschrift für Architektur und Design, Band (Jahr): 22 (2009).
(3) - ebd.
1 - Classic Tortellini from Migros
2 - Microwave, invented by Percy Spencer as „Radarange“, 1946.
3 - multimedia kitchen: idea of modern kitchen, 60s (bab.ch/interfoto)