Coming to grips with our fascination for kitchen gadgets
Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, which could explain the tidal wave of kitchen contraptions that had been rolled out over the years — some curious, some inexplicably ridiculous.
Many years ago I went and did the weekly shop at the local supermarket, loaded the bags into the boot of the car, drove home and, when I popped the boot to unpack, discovered that the age-old grocery bomb had once again gone off.
The flimsy shopping bags had slithered about on the ride home and filled the boot with rolling apples, eggs, vegetables, lamb chops, the lot, mixed in with whiffy running shoes, a tennis racquet and the tyre jack.
Staring into the chaos, speechless, I had an epiphany.
That’s when the Grocery Gripper hit me, necessity being the mother of invention as they say. But more of the Gripper later.
Thinking of this revolutionary idea, one that would help millions of people and make me a fortune, I reflected on great food-related inventions of the past, those lightbulb moments people (like me, with the aforementioned Gripper) had somehow turned into reality to streamline our lives, enhance our food consumption and optimise our dietary imperatives, making everything so much easier, less time-consuming and more accessible.
Take George Foreman’s Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine.
For those with short memories, Foreman was one of the greatest heavyweight boxing champions in history. And the Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine, a product the American slugger enthusiastically endorsed in his retirement, was little more than a compact sandwich press that could cook your steak, sausages, rissoles or hamburger patties on both sides.
The simplistic genius of the griller was that the base was tilted up at a slight angle so that the meat fat, courtesy of gravity, ran down little gutters and into a fat-catching tray. In the end you had the enormous satisfaction of seeing the pooling grease in the tray and being assured, before your own eyes, that that nasty fat was ultimately going down the drain and not into your body. Thus the lean, the mean, and the fat-reducing element of this masterpiece of modern cookery.
In early advertisements for the griller George points out: “It has my name on it!” And: “Knocks out the fat!”
(No mention here of the famous Rumble in the Jungle boxing bout between Foreman and Muhammad Ali in 1974 in the now Democratic Republic of the Congo, considered the greatest fight of the 20th century, in which Ali survived the brutal Foreman over eight rounds then knocked his block off, rendering George for all time the Lean Not-So-Mean TKO Concussion Machine.)
Funnily, even George wasn’t so fussed with his fat-busting cooking contraption in the early days. As he wrote in his book, Knockout Entrepreneur: “I just signed the contract so I could get 16 free grills for my homes, my training camp, my friends, my mom, cousins, and other family members. That’s all I really expected to get out of the grill deal. I never dreamed this opportunity would turn into a grilling empire!”
In recent months stories about George’s Griller have mysteriously spewed up on the internet, as the internet is wont to do, vying for attention alongside the chaos in Ukraine, Middle East peace prospects and bulk news about Medicare bulk billing.
Still, it got me thinking about the tidal wave of food and kitchen contraptions that had been rolled out through the years; some curious, some that seemed a good idea at the time, some inexplicably ridiculous, and many probably still residing in the shadowy portions of kitchen cabinets and drawers around the world.
Aside from George’s knockout griller – still going after 30 years, with sales in excess of 100 million – there have been some doozy inventions that somehow made it on to the showroom floor and into our kitchens.
Take the Strawberry Huller, a strange, pincer-like device that, with the push of a button, opens a set of clasps and grips and removes those annoying green stem tops from strawberries without “wasting precious millimetres” of the glorious red flesh. According to the Chef’N Stem Gem Strawberry Huller product details, the device is “fun and safe (for) kids to use when helping out in the kitchen”.
Firstly, what sort of kids get a kick out of hulling strawberries with something that could be done more efficiently with just a sharp knife?
Then there’s an array of fruit and vegetable slicers, a suite of torturous-looking contraptions specifically designed to cut your onions, tomatoes and even bananas – yes, the banana cutter with its rows of guillotine-sharp teeth is actually shaped like a generic banana.
Who has the time to wash these weird contraptions after use, let alone be ferried to hospital by ambulance after you’ve accidentally slipped a finger into the banana carver and amputated yourself?
What of the Appetito Pickle Tong? This long cylinder resembles the sort of needle you might find in an orthodontist’s surgery. Push down and it releases a set of miniature clasping tongs. “No more chasing the last pickle around the jar,” it proudly proclaims. Really? No offence, but you’d have to be chasing your own last brain cells around a jar to even think of buying one of these.
Remember the electric kitchen knife? Not only is it a little scary to contemplate the sort of mind that would come up with a kitchen tool that not only resembled a very small chainsaw but ripped into your Sunday roast with such gusto that it sent flesh and its attendant juice flying. Its only real purpose, it appears, was to save the user from all that energy expended by the human arm when it came to carving meat. Otherwise, given the cacophony it produced, it was only really good for scaring the willikins out of dogs and small children.
In the same family were the electric salt and pepper grinders. Were they ever a thing? Nothing like a small cacophonous building site-style ruckus when you’re seasoning your food.
They must still be selling though. You can now buy a set online that comes with a USB recharge port, an adjustable coarseness setting and with the whole business illuminated “during operation” with an ambient light. That your salt and pepper dispensers come with a User’s Manual should, you’d think, be a big red flag right there.
Who too could live without an automatic pan stirrer?
This, you know immediately, was invented by somebody with way too much time on their hands. You lower this little three-legged battery-operated marvel directly into your pan of cooking food then watch it waltz and jiggle around.
It’s akin to a small, alien spaceship landing in a bubbling swamp and trying to extract itself to freedom. According to instructions, it must not be left unattended in the kitchen. So you save all that energy stirring the food with a wooden spoon and instead spend that time watching the stirrer fight its way through chilli or risotto without tipping over and shorting out its AA batteries.
These all pale when lined up against the Grocery Gripper.
To prevent your grocery bag boot disaster, my idea was to have a purpose-built plastic flatpack secured on the floor of your boot. Then, when you had grocery bags to transport, you pulled a lever and the Gripper rose like a pop-up in a children’s book, offering interlocked cube-shaped spaces to lower your bags into – tight, snug, unrollable – for the duration of your home journey.
When you removed the groceries from the grip of the Gripper, it then folded down flat again, like a concertina, returning you to full boot space. Job done. And no pesky errant lemons or cans of air freshener or unhulled strawberries or bananas doomed to be decapitated with piano wire having rolled out of sight.
No mess. No worries.
I failed to pursue the Grocery Gripper.
And 20 years later, what did I find? That carmaker BMW was offering a “Grocery Gripper” with its vehicles. It resembles a plastic, upturned, almost fully bunched fist, the stumped fingers serving as hooks for your grocery bag handles.
“The Grocery Gripper mounts easily in the luggage compartment to help secure multiple bags, packages and other loose items. It is constructed of rugged ABS plastic, which ensures years of utility,” the instructions guff.
Pfft. Disappointed? Moi?
I have nothing to offer but the raised middle finger of my upturned, almost fully bunched fist.
Sometimes the simplest ideas are born of chaos.