Part III -Pizza Pockets and Microwave Popcorn

Hey all, just finished my last day of the ethnography/experiment where I can use only a microwave to cook my food. It was… interesting. But more on that in blog 5. This entry will be a continuation of the last post on the microwave boom, but will be more focused on its connection with the rise in fast food and the emphasis on convenience and efficiency in modern capitalist culture. Around the 1990s and the turn of the century, the microwave was ubiquitous in the family home and was an integral part of cooking the family’s meals. In addition, specialized foods were created for the sole purpose of being heated in the microwave (think pizza pockets, Hungry-Man Dinners, instant oatmeal and such). 

Going through a grocery store showed whole isles dedicated to foods that were flash frozen and could be reheated quickly with a microwave. Microwave dinners, or TV dinners, became the cool things to eat. I distinctly remember eating Lean Cuisines at least 2 nights a week in the car on the way to soccer. I never liked the taste of them but I still ate them frequently because they were fast, easy and I could cook them myself (which was important for someone who had trouble making Rice Krispie squares). That was one of the major selling points for the microwave actually; that parents felt ok about letting their kids use the microwave by themselves before they let them touch the stove or oven. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t allowed to use the microwave, but I do remember the first time I was allowed to turn on our gas stove (it was terrifying).

Today the microwave is so immersed in our society that there are whole isles in the grocery store dedicated to foods that can be prepared strictly in the microwave. Around 95% of Americans have one and over 80% of Americans rate the microwave as the number 1 technology that makes their lives easier and one of the most useful appliances that they would not want to live without. You can walk into many stores and find a model for less than $100, proving their ubiquitous nature and the high degree of market saturation that they have achieved. This also shows the microwave’s change in semiotics (the study of signs and symbols) from a symbol of status for the upper class people who could afford one initially, to an everyday item that is a distinct part of popular culture that the masses can own.

The rising use and dependence on the microwave in our culture coincides with the fast food culture that is omnipresent in much of Western society. Microwaveable foods are akin to fast food in the way that they put time and efficiency over the all other qualities of the finished product. Along with fast food, microwaveable food has become synonymous with convenience foods, and the food production market has become completely saturated with these methods. This decreases people’s agency and ability to choose how they want to prepare their food. The fact that the market itself is built around offering convenience goods means that choice is basically structured out of the equation and what foods we choose to eat and how we make them is actually decided by what’s available to consumers, not necessarily by what we truly want. Also, as we rely more on technology to cook our food for us we become more like cyborgs, leading us to a worrying dilemma of the future consisting of; a) machines ruling the human world, or b) half-human half-machine beings… I dread the day. Anyway, the more our lives become saturated with technologies and the more we become reliant on these technologies to help us, the more the use of them becomes unconscious and normalized.

Another thing about the use of the microwave. Microwaves allow us to create food at the press of a button; there is no actual skill or thinking involved (other than remembering to not put metal in the microwave… you only make that mistake once). Generally you just follow the instructions on the back of the box or heat the item up until its warm enough or cooked through. In this way microwave use has changed our relationship with food. Even in prehistoric days, man had an intimate connection with the food he hunted or gathered because he had to find it, harvest it, prepare it and possibly cook it. It required skill, precision and knowledge of the food; otherwise they didn’t eat. This connection has been lost with the introduction of microwave technology as the middle man in the equation. Food has become something that is now simply assembled instead of been created and centres on ingredients that are unknown and simple to thaw. In this way our reliance on convenience technology allows us to factor ourselves out of the process of food production, so that in the end we are reduced to nothing more than consumers. I’m not saying that using a stovetop burner brings us closer to the food that we eat, but it certainly demands that we know a bit more about the food other than how long it takes to defrost.

Basically the microwave is a convenience food appliance, rising in popularity during a time when convenience and efficiency were goals that people strived for. In the next blog I’ll look at some resistance movements and countercultures to this notion of doing things as fast as possible.