his whole glimpse-of-future-technology thing has gone from Big Brother to Oh, Brother. Spend 20 minutes in Kraft’s Kitchen of the Future and you, too, may fall under the impression that our ever-wired world is on the verge of going too far.
The Kitchen of the Future—a glitzy, high-tech showplace that Kraft built in its R&D facilities last May—predicts how American families will be living, eating and (ahem) cooking in 2010. This kitchen has PCs on the fridge, on the aqua countertop, and on a giant plasma screen mounted under the cupboards. There’s an RFID reader built into the counter; you take a pizza from the freezer, swipe its RFID tag across the reader and a Hal-like voice 1) tells you it’s the last pizza in your freezer; 2) automatically adds it to your computerized shopping list); and 3) turns on the oven—which, by the way, can refrigerate, then heat up dinner on a timer.
It gets better: Mom can turn on the oven from her car, using a touch-screen menu on her dashboard. In fact, Mom can cook three meals at once, starting behind the wheel and then finishing up with her PC at home. She picks up Miguel at soccer practice; he peruses his personal menu on Mom’s dashboard computer and picks pizza. Mom gets that oven going. Meanwhile, Irma and Rosie choose from their own menu displayed on the PC in Dad’s car, then call Mom (via old-fashioned cell phone) to confirm their orders. Once home, Mom consults her PC to confirm the menus and check Dad’s ETA.
In the end, of course, it’s Mom, not the computer, who does the actual cooking. The appliances just help “stage everything,” says Jeff Gathe, Kraft’s director of IS innovations. “It’s part of a push towards appliances that communicate with each other.”
The whole system hinges on “home control” software that tracks family members’ tastes and schedules, and what’s in the fridge. It matches the pantry inventory with everyone’s favorite foods (and diet restrictions) to suggest a menu for each person. It’s like Rosie, without the frilly apron.
My favorite feature is the map that uses GPS to track Dad’s commute and estimate his ETA. It makes me think of the Weasley’s clock, one of the best gadgets to appear in Harry Potter books. The clock has nine hands—one for each member of the family—and the hands point to each person’s current state: “at work,” “in transit,” or, a stroke of genius, “in mortal danger.”
Gathe shrugs; he doesn’t seem to think it’ll all come true, either. Kraft just wants to see “how we can adapt our products to leverage the technology that appliance companies think we’ll be using five to 10 years from now,” he says.
There’s some human connection that’s lost when Mom IM’s the kids to say “Dinner in 10 minutes”; when a camera mounted in the kitchen ceiling connects you to customer service (“Are these onions caramelized?”); when you learn how to cook from a demo on your PC and not from your mother.
I know, I’m naïve. No one learns to cook from her mother anymore. And Kraft goes to great pains to show that all this technology gives the family a cozy half hour together before the big PC on the wall says it’s time for the carpool to ballet lessons. But it’s a forced togetherness. If dinner is the last bastion of family intimacy—and for Kraft, that’s prime positioning—can it really be managed by microchip and still feel human when you get to the table? Is that really where we’re heading on the plasma-screen map of the future?
Mortal danger.
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