Rory Sutherland: Why don’t Americans have kettles?

I enjoy reading reviews of kitchen gadgetry. Clever new kitchen products are often under-appreciated. Many rituals around food preparation are intended to signal personal effort, rather than to produce edible food with a minimum of fuss. There is hence a tendency towards bogus authenticity among amateur cooks which causes them to eschew labour-saving devices in favour of doing everything in a faux-Victorian fashion.

Professional chefs, who must produce food in quantity every day, do not suffer this delusion: one Michelin-starred chef, when asked to name his favourite item of kitchen equipment, replied ‘the microwave’. Two new devices I particularly recommend are the air-fryer and the soupmaker. Both are commonplace in parts of Asia but were until recently unknown in Britain. Technological adoption is often strangely localised. Or, as William Gibson has it, ‘The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.’ For instance, browsing through Virginia Postrel’s column on cookery equipment on the US website Bloomberg.com, I was astonished to come across this recommendation among a list of fairly obscure kitchen implements:

Cuisinart electric kettle, $65 You may have gone to Britain and experienced the joy of their electric kettles, which heat up water for tea almost instantly. Sadly, you will not experience that joy on this side of the pond, because they use 220-volt power and we use 110, which apparently means that our electric kettles cannot heat up water as fast as theirs. However, an electric kettle is still extremely useful. It heats up water faster than a stovetop kettle and you can’t burn out the bottom of the pot. Also excellent for offices and dorm rooms. I have this Cuisinart, which is nice because the kettle itself is wireless (there’s a base with a heating element that plugs in).

Seriously? Americans can put a man on the moon and build the USS Nimitz, yet in 2014 you need to travel to Britain to experience the electric kettle? And people need a detailed explanation of what one is, and is used for? Why is Silicon Valley squandering its time developing driverless cars and an Apple iWatch when 300 million people lack access to the single most basic item of domestic equipment? (In fact, the British origins of the electric kettle read like an Ealing Comedy version of the Silicon Valley story.