The Big Problem Your Favorite Kitchen Gadget Can’t Fix
Is the Instant Pot America’s only hope for more leisure time?
There are a lot of fundamental problems with existence, but among the most pressing is that you need to feed yourself three times a day, basically every day, for, like, 80 years. If you’re an American woman, the stakes of food preparation are likely to be even higher. Statistically, you’ll probably get married and have at least one kid, and although your family will probably need you to get a full-time job, you’ll also be saddled with the majority of the domestic labor, of which food acquisition and preparation is an omnipresent component.
Lately, women’s trendiest ally in this battle is a kitchen-dwelling robot pod called an Instant Pot. The Instant Pot’s massive popularity — Amazon sold 300,000 units of the product during 2018’s Prime Day sale alone — is based on a simple promise. If users insert some ingredients, press some buttons, and pay careful attention to the details of a recipe, then out comes a hot meal of fresh ingredients, big enough to feed a family, in less time than traditional cooking methods take.
By inspiring hope for the automation of the domestic, the Instant Pot joins a lineage of kitchen gadgetry that includes the Crock-Pot and the microwave — consumer sensations that attempt…
