Next attraction: Push-button cooking

All the fuss about “molecular gastronomy” has somehow failed to address the most basic issue in food preparation and consumption: Who’s going to cook? 

Despite the relentless Martha Stewartification of society, there  are still some of us who cannot cook and haven’t the slightest interest in learning how. What, and deprive the Mario Batalis and Jamie Olivers of gainful employment and a few more millions? 

I hear Ferran Adria is closing his famous restaurant El Bulli — there goes my reservation for the year 2013 (the year after the supposed apocalypse according to the Mayans). Ferran, you’re welcome to work in my kitchen, but you’ll have to make do with a one-burner electric stove, a frying pan, an oven toaster, and a blender. 

I must point out that all these implements were gifts from well-meaning friends who thought that I would eventually pick up a spatula and cook something. That was 15 years ago. In that time I have eaten in hundreds of restaurants and ordered thousands of pizzas. I have had many mediocre meals, endured atrocious service, and emitted many horrified shrieks upon seeing the bill, but none of these have convinced me to take up cooking. It is too much trouble. Cooking is a labor-intensive activity whose results vanish down your gullet in minutes. My friends tell me that cooking is a form of therapy. I have too much therapy as it is; I am a columnist.

Now a couple of guys at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have proposed an easier way to cook. According to Discovery News, Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran have produced concept designs and a prototype for a personal food factory called the Cornucopia project. These machines let you prepare entire meals by pushing a few buttons. It’s all very The Jetsons.

First there’s the Robotic Chef, not unlike the surgical robots in hospital operating rooms, which can cut, cook, and spice your food with great precision. A low-powered laser can cook a steak so expertly that the outside may be rare while the inside is well-done. It might even be able to burn off all the fat in the meat.

Why stop there? I suggest that the Robotic Chef be given higher brain functions and a voice like HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Every time you make a filet mignon, the Robotic Chef says, “What do you think you’re doing, Dave? Remember your triglyceride levels.” Then it could be both a digital cook and a diet program.

Coelho and Zoran have also designed a Virtuoso Mixer, which looks like a stack of three rotating carousels. The top and middle stacks each have eight containers. The top containers are equipped with sensors to measure weight, humidity, and temperature. The middle containers can crush and mix ingredients, which are then deposited in the lowest stack. This way you can experiment with the amounts and proportions of the ingredients without having to touch them. 

And it still looks complicated. 

For making desserts there’s the Digital Fabricator, which looks like a big microwave oven with canisters on top. These canisters store ingredients. The user prepares a meal by punching buttons on a touch screen or going to the website. The canisters dispense the ingredients in a mixer, then the result is heated or cooled in the chamber.

Along the same lines there’s the chocolate mixer, which can be programmed to release sweets, sauces, and nuts in specific quantities. 

These machines are still in the development stage. Inventor Coelho hopes it will change the way people think about food. Maybe so, but the personal food factory does not address the second most basic issue regarding food preparation and consumption: Who’s going to wash the dishes? And in the case of these conceptual Cornucopia machines, all the containers of the ingredients? Are these machines self-cleaning, or will we have to take them apart and wash all the components through which our food passes? 

I suspect that the answer to these questions is: You cooked with it, you wash it.

Excuse me, I have dinner reservations.