Comfortable convenience

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.