Kitchens of the Future

the cook in my household. Also, but so so. Baking is is certainly a part of the whole cooking subset of food creation. I'm actually not very good at that. I'm good at all the other kinds of cooking, but not at the baking. Oh, it's much more orderly. I I the freedom of cooking drives me a little bit crazy. Yeah. I think the difference between baking and cooking is sort of like the difference between being a chemistry lab researcher

and a soccer player. Well, as we have established, we are recording this as the World Cup is still going on, and UH and I have determined that the rules for soccer allow you to team at least forty seven people on the field at a single time. This is just based upon my own observations. I haven't actually looked into the rules, so I'm gonna go ahead and say sure.

But getting into getting into what we actually gathered here to talk about kitchens before we talk about the stuff we we have in our notes, One thing I wanted to mention is that the kitchen of the future is one of those things that gets gets looked at fairly frequently, and it can be a lot of fun to go back and look at what past predictions of what future kitchens is in stuff that's now in our past, why

they would look like do do you know? So? Earlier today we were all watching this video from the All Know What year was seven, and it was predicting the kitchen of nineteen that's exactly right, ninety nine and it is a rawlic we uh frolic. It was a looking good time. Yeah, it was if you like your misogyny with with Peppie jazz tunes. Yeah, it imagines that in the future you won't have to do any work to prepare meals, but mom's still in the kitchen. Yeah, she's

not allowed to leave that room. Don't don't take that away from women. That's all we have that in valium, apparently because she looks so happy. Yes, she would contact her family with the very personal touch of turning on an enormous bank of television monitors to check in, and her husband, the loving man that he was, made specific demands on what the meal should be for lunch. He's so grumbly that she won't make him a cheeseburger. For

her son. She tells her son that lunch will be ready in two minutes, so he starts counting down the seconds because you know, kids are adorable. Well, it's the future, so it's a robot son. I guess that actually makes way more sense now. It certainly didn't seem all that life like so at any rate, the the episode goes on some stuff that they predict is kind of interesting because it's stuff we're still talking about today. Well, it predicts, for example, the miracle that in the future all meals

will be pre frozen in advance. I was going to actually talk about one that was true Joe, which was that the the idea that he had the computer that gave the nutritional value of a proposed meal, and it said this is four calories above what was suggested, so you should really think of an alternative. And here's a suggestion. That's actually something that we see with apps right now you can put in what you were going to make.

And so that part was actually realistic. The part about all the food being frozen, I hope is not a realistic view of what the future is going to be because I like to have some fresh food once in a while. Yeah, well, I was just commenting on the bizarreness of how they seemed to see this as a

really great thing. Well, it's the idea was that for the convenience, right, And it was all automated in the video and the video she she essentially said what each person was going to eat, pressed a button and then magically this frozen food went through a microwave all at the same time and then came out on a very institutionalized looking trade you know, it's got a conveyor belt.

And then this white cardboard barge of food comes out to serve up the gullets of the family and they and did you hear they said they had the the color coordinated disposable plates like This was very much a make and throw away kind of culture, which is something that you would have seen back in the late sixties but not so much today. It was specified in a

in a different video. Walter Cronkite also wound up on this set at some point, and there's another video with him talking about this amazing kitchen of the of the future, and and he specified that the plastics that the plates were made of would get mel to down and made into new plates for the next so there would be recycling. So there was was recycling. Also, I love personally melting down plastic in my own home. So there's nothing like

that smell. As we have learned as we've worked with the three D printer we now have in our office, the smell of burning plastic is in fact a very soothing odor Um tried the new model with lead plates. So and Joe, you pointed out something else that Walter Cronkite said that that got you kind of chuckling about the the interface that you would use to uh to in the kitchen of tomorrow. Right. I can't remember what

was it. I said it was the punch cards. Joe, He's like, yeah, you'll plan your meal or your you'll enter your meal preferences with a typewriter or punch card.

So the point that Joe was making, and it's something that we need to point out too before we get into any of our predictions, it's that often the predictions we make about the future are based on extending out what current technology is capable of doing, and some things we end up going way off the rails thinking about stuff that may not really be within technologies uh scope of being able to do, and other things are going to be far too conservative because it's based upon interfaces

that we're familiar with now and we don't anticipate what that next breakthrough is gonna be that's going to completely change things. Yeah, it is pretty funny the way we just we can't level our expectations for the future. We're always being way too optimistic about some things and not

even closed to optimistic enough about others. Right, So some of the things we're gonna talk about today will it will include a little bit of criticism and skepticism about a few of the items because they're ones that it may turn out the technology is not sophisticated enough to really deliver upon the promise, may not within the next couple hundred years. Yeah, hey, okay, I don't want to

leave the nineteen sixties yet. I want to I want to take us back in the way, back to predicting the future in the past machine, right, okay, okay, so that's a very specific machine. Actually not that wouldn't be exactly right, not predicting the future, just talking about the miracle of technology. Sure. Uh. Some nights I found this ad copy from a newspaper ad that was running in the late sixties, like nine sixty nine for a microwave oven,

and I just want to read you this copy. The indoor Outdoor Miracle Worker cook or derves in seconds a five pound roast in thirty seven minutes, a baked potato in four minutes. The amazing Amana radar range microwave oven cooks with microwave energy, faster and cleaner than gas or electricity. Though I assume you have to plug it into the wall.

But it's not an electrical right the Yeah. Uh. What's more, it's portable, so if you're having a cookout, you just wheel the radar range to the patio and plug it in. With radar range, you're always set for an instant dinner party, and you haven't stood over a hot stove, suffer catd in smoke, or scrubbed a single pan because radar range heats only the food, never the chef. See radar range in action at your Amano dealers. If that doesn't make a believer out of you, it's a miracle now, you know.

The microwave was really seen as kind of a miracle device. You know how it was invented? Right? Or how how the right? Yeah? Yeah. So there's a fellow named Percy Spencer who was working with radar tubes. It was his specialty,

was what he was working with. And he realized that while he was working next to one radar tube, the candy bar he had in his pocket had melted, and he got him to thinking about what might be going on, and he realized that was an interaction of the microwaves agitating molecules inside the candy bar and making them vibrate essentially and warm up. And that became the basis for the microwave oven and uh, and it really was considered

sort of this miracle technology. There was no open flame, there was no heated element, and yet you would put food into this thing. You'd hear maybe a fan going off to help distribute microwaves and maybe uh fan away some some you know, steam and other stuff coming up from the food, and it was magically hot, like it had cooked magically to be To be fair, I'm still pretty impressed by microwaves today. I mean I grew up

with them. I've always had one as far back as I can personally remember, and that's I mean, it makes my food warm. That's great. Well, it is pretty great if you want to like defrost something quickly or left over, if you've got a frozen dinner, like if you're if unlike the the pictures of the future where everything is frozen and it's wonderful, most of us are thinking about, well, you we will depend upon a frozen dinner because it's economical or it's efficient. It's not because it's a miracle

of modern gore mat cuisine. Right. I want to point out in this ad copy I just read that the incredible tone deafness about what we like in food and uh and how the esthetic dicks of food and social gatherings fit together. So they're imagining you want to make a roast, I guess like a like a red roast or something a five pound roast in thirty seven minutes.

So you want to put the roast into the microwave and just turn it into a moon rock, or or you you're having a barbecue, they say take it out on the patio and barbecue withrowave, because that's exactly like cooking a burger on an open flame, exactly replaced the grill. Yeah, it's not the only technology from back then that was greeted with wide eyed enthusiasm and and awe right, I mean there are other technologies that entered the kitchen. They

got incredible amounts of response. But you know today we just look back and say, really so uh sure. Well, like in when the single armed water faucet hit the market, it was big news. You didn't have to have you no longer were you slave to two knobs for turning on your water. You can now you could have a single control where you can go from boiling hot to

ice cold in the span of a micron. But but honestly, probably every single appliance that we use today, refrigerators or blenders or toasters or toaster ovens or whatever, whatever, we're probably at one point marketed as the whatever thing of the incredible future. Before we started this, I made Joe watch a tex Savery cartoon, The Home of the Future, which obviously was meant as a spoof on that sort of stuff and is completely outrageous, and at the same

time you think, yeah, this is dead on. This is exactly the way that those sort of items had been marketed. And some of them, you know, some of them turned out to be pretty cool and they stuck around. A lot of the stuff that's been marketed as the kitchen of the future has not panned out to be practical and has not been widely adopted. Yeah, some of my favorites from the nineteen fifties and sixties include tractable motorized

appliances so that all of your surfaces are streamlined. Just like if you want to blend something, you push a button and the blender comes up out of the countertop or back out from the wall or something like, etcetera. That'll be fantastic when it breaks. See, I would just want I would want that, But I wanted to be like young Frankenstein's style, where you you know, you you move the salt shaker and then suddenly the wall pivots and then there's your blender, and that's what I want.

You climb into it occasionally Indiana Jones and his dad are there. Also motion activated appliances, because if I ever flail like a muppet, as I do basically every three and a half seconds, I really want that to turn on my oven. That sounds amazing. I'm sorry, I just had a horrible image, but it's you, you cooking, and you like catch your sleeve on fire on the stove, and as you're flailing, all of your appliances are coming or you just do the thing that happens to all

of us. Sooner or later, something you are cooking ends up setting off the smoke detectors, so you start fanning the smoke detect to try and get the smoke to clear out, and meanwhile you're making all your appliances go completely bonkers. Microive starts cooking dry. Yeah, I can see why they didn't catch on. Also also waterproof appliances so that you can just like, you know, pressure wash your

entire kitchen. I am in favor of that. Oh so it's like those uh those public restrooms in Europe where the door just closes and then it sanitizes every surface exactly, best not be in that restroom and that happens, you will you thought some things you will never forget. Yeah, whenever you walk into a room and you see a drain in the center of the floor, you know some serious stuff's about to go down. Yeah, it's either it's either like a slaughter house or it's an elementary school bathroom.

Welcome to your abattoir of the future. No, but, but some, but some of these ideas are absolutely legitimate. Like one of the ones that I was also running into and my research a lot today was this crazy concept for electronic photo heavy recipe cards that you can just pull up whenever you want them. And I was like, oh, okay, that's that's an iPad or d dot com essentially the Internet. Yeah,

and there are tons of apps obviously as well. Some of them are specifically geared towards living a healthy lifestyle. They might be part of the fitness app that will give you ideas for recipes that will help you on your on your plan to either lose weight or gain muscle mass or whatever it may be that you're doing. So that's one of those that actually has panned out.

It's kind of like we were talking about that video at the very top of the show, the bit about predicting, Hey, this particular meal that you have planned doesn't meet your nutritional guides that you have set up. Therefore you might want to think of this other thing. That's pretty cool that some of those things are starting to pan out. Now. I think we should transition to today and start making our own wild and crazy predictions that people in the

future will make fun of. Okay, let's do that, but well, no, let's actually let's do that, but let's also try to introduce a little bit of levelheadedness and say maybe maybe not where we feel it's warranted. But I think the main thing I want to get at first is how the Internet of things, this concept we've talked about before,

will apply to the kitchen. And we actually already talked about the kitchen a little bit back when we were doing our original podcasts and video about the Internet of Things, but we wanted to go into more detail about that today. And some of that just means keeping track of what you have and what you don't have, right, That's one of the basic things the Internet of things. Whenever you

see anything about a refrigerator, for example, almost always. One of those is inventory control, where it keeps track of exactly what you have in there at any given time. So if you have decided, hey, I would love to make such and such tonight for dinner, and you put that in, it can actually cross reference your fridge and say, oh, well, if you want to make that, then you need to go to the store and also pick up these two other rest two other ingredients to make that dish. Yeah,

that I think that's a great idea. We should probably do a brief aside, just for those who have not seen our previous Internet of Things content, to define the concept. The Internet of Things means we just take the same concept, but a smaller proportion of all these things you interact with our virtual documents. A lot of them are real

appliances and objects and things in your environment. So you're the lamp and the refrigerator, and the stove and the couch and the lock on the front door are all communicating with your computer and your mobile device, right and someone. Sometimes they'll even just be communicating with one another, and you don't ever have to get into any kind of control situation with your laptop or mobile device at all.

These could be completely automated devices that are relying on input from sensors and then based upon some change in the environment, they react in a in some ways. So for example, you walk through the door and all your lights come on, or you know, it turns to a certain time at night and certain lights either dim or go out, that kind of thing. It's all basic stuff that we've seen gradually evolve over the last few years, and now we're getting to a point where we can

seriously start plating this technology in all all sorts of things. Right, So to get back to what you were talking about earlier, you can immediately see how this could be really useful if if you just had, say, a refrigerator that talked to your to your phone and new was able to somehow know what was inside it. So you're on the way home from work. You know you need to go to the grocery store, but you can't remember if you already have eggs, and you can just check. You can

just check the app on your phone. The refrigerator comes on, scan says, yes, you have four eggs in The refrigerator may even be able to tell you whether or not the stuff you have is still good. It may say you know what you want to buy in some anyway

because these seven weeks ago. Yeah, it makes me think of the King of the Hill thing, where you would get a little text from your on your phone and say there's some milk in the fridge that's about to go bad, and about three seconds later there it goes yeah, And this isn't all that far off in the future. LG is currently working on a system that would let you text your appliances and like talk to your appliances as though they are living things like the Brave Little Toaster.

You'd be going like, hey, fridge, do we have any eggs and it could answer you, or hey, oven, let's cook a pot roast and it would pre program itself for optimal pot roast temperature. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I can see this being in fact very easy to do if if you're talking about packaged foods, because package foods, I think would be pretty easy to encode r F I D into the package, which some people are incredibly resistant too. But I'll talk about that in the second. Right.

Oh sure, I'm not saying we necessarily should do this, but uh, if you so you put the new coffee creamer in the fridge. The box it comes in has our f I D. The fridge knows that there's coffee creamer in there and when it came into the fridge for the first time. So that seems easy. It seems harder though, how you might manage things like meat and produce.

Maybe you would just put those in a package. Also though that then you're talking about increasing more and more plastic and stuff like that, exactly like, how do you how does the fridge know what is in it? And are different ways of going about that. There's the r f i D chip like you were saying, which some people say, well, there's a couple of different concerns there. One is for people who just don't like that kind

of technology period, They find that to be invasive. Yeah, because essentially, who else knows that I have this stuff in my fridge? And it doesn't matter whether the stuff in my fridge is something that I should be ashamed of or whatever or or you know, worried about. It's that on principle, no one's business but my own is what you know, that's that's my fridge. You do have no business knowing what's in there? Right? Oh sorry, quick

diversion again. Just if you don't know r F I D radio frequency i D. So it's sort of like having a bar code that you can identify with a radio signal. Right, And another concern is that by including r F I D you end up increasing the cost of the items because they have to incorporate that into

the packaging. And you know, anytime there's a big change in packaging, whether it's you know, it might be something that's mandated by the Food and Drug Administration, if there's a discovery that a certain type of packaging can be dangerous than obviously this plastic we've been using and everything is leaching chemicals exactly, so now you gotta change everything. Well, that can mean that the cost of the item may go up, so there's some people who object on that basis.

You could have something where it would be more for packaged foods, things that already have like a barcode on it where you scan the code before you put it in the fridge, either with an app on your phone, or maybe the fridge itself has a little scanner. Imagine it wouldn't be hard for the fridge to do it automatic. You just have to have a scanner that you could

have the code face and it goes. Really, I mean, anyone who has used a scanner at one of those grocery stores like a self service thing knows they're incredibly fast. But it means that you do have one extra step besides just grocery shopping and then putting everything in your fridge. I could I could envision some kind of weird, sort of creepy technology that would let you while you're scanning your items out at the grocery store, it's a message out to your fresh sure and says, hey, these are

the things that are about to come in. Or perhaps some kind of system of the cashier at your grocery store could send you home with a little R F I D. Packet of like, hey, this is how much meat you bought and how many vegges you bought and stuff. Oh yeah, So I think all of these are possibilities. It's it's really the point we're making is that the technology for the interconnectivity is there. It's the implementation that

is the question, right, yeah, uh yeah. Part of the question with a lot of these things we're going to bring up today, I think y'all will probably agree is a lot of them seem like they could be cool and could be useful, but they all also would be expensive and at least at first and difficult to implement. So sort of the question is not just can we do it, because in most cases I think it's easy to do it, just is it worth it? Is it worth going through all the effort to do this? Does

it actually save you that much energy? Time? Energy? Right? Is it? Is it truly convenient enough for it to be worth the investment? Yeah? Uh so? I want to talk about another possibility with the Internet of things in the kitchen, which is communication between devices for the preparation

of food. Sure. So, for example, if you have picked a like you want to make a lasagna, and you have sent that message to your fridge, say that's what I want to do today, I'm gonna make lasagna, and your fridge is looked at the stuff that's in there, and it's told you, hey, by the way, you need to go and buy some some tomatoes, you need to go buy some garlic, everything else. You're good to go.

You go to the store and you buy that. Meanwhile, the fridge is also talking to the stove and saying, hey, you know, big boss Man is gonna be home in about twenty minutes. Let's go ahead and start preha heating so that it's ready to go once the he's back and he's ready to put the lasagna in the oven. And so that's you know, one of the ways that this could happen where you have this intercommunication between different

devices that work together. Uh, and because they're all on the same page, they can make sure that all the sayings are proper for whatever it is you want to make. That's the idea. Personally, I'm a little nervous about the idea of my oven preheating when I'm not in the house, like you accidentally, like you butt dial your oven. I want to cook. I want to cook a cake of uranium in It's preheat to five thousand degree. Please begin self cleaning right, and then you go inside like why

is it so hot and on fire? Um? Yeah, So there are some definitely definite things you've got to think about. But it's a neat idea. The idea of these separate devices that usually are their own thing to have no connection with each other other than the fact that they're all involved in some form of the food production process. Now they're actually working together. You could even have stuff like uh sinks working together in various ways. I'll talk

a little bit more about that later. It's not just you know, the obvious fridge and oven kind of pairing. It could be other things as well, and that's pretty neat. Although the big limited limitation there is that, as far as I know, no one has come up with a like a third party standard that these devices used to communicate with one another. In other words, if you want, yeah, if you want these, if you want these appliances to talk to each other, you have to buy all of

them from the same source. So even if you love one company's refrigerator but you love another company's oven, you're not gonna be able to take advantage of this interconnectivity because they're talking to different languages. You would have to buy them all from You have to make a compromise on either the fridge or the oven and buy them both from the same source. Or I think clearly Android needs to start programming these cream sandwich and but Android

butt nest. So there is a chance that we're going to start seeing some Google based stuff that would allow third party manufacturers to use that kind of operating system, meaning that as long as you had that operating system operating on on the multiple things in your kitchen, they could talk to each other. So while while you're making a clever joke, it's also very much in the realm

of possibility. Although okay, one application of this is the idea of remote controlling, which is a thing that exists right now, like on on the market. I mean, the the idea of being able to if you know, if you put something in your slow cooker at the beginning of the day and you're like, oh, it's three pm, I'm going to turn this up to high to do whatever it needs to do, right, and then when you come home, delicious meal is cooked. Um, that's cool. There's

great idea. There's a there's a digital thermometer on the market that will ping your phone when your food is ready. Also amazing that Yeah, that's not even all that advance, but I can see how that last when you mentioned, might be one of the most useful of all. Not necessarily for when you're out of the house, but let's say you've got a roast going and you want to be outside or somewhere else, you know, and and so it just pings your phone and says, oh, it's come

up to right internal, it's safe for eating. You want to come here if you happen to be, you know, making a Thanksgiving dinner and you want to when the turkey is ready and you know you've got a lot of things going on all at once. It's very useful, uh, And you don't have to worry about accidentally cooking something for too long and making it all dried out and inedible, like the way almost all of my big meals turn out small meals. I'm great at I'm sorry. Well, what

about what about other applications here? Well, okay, so we just talked about how the Internet of Things could give you data on your food, but what about data about yourself? Yeah, this is kind of going back to that idea of having things like fitness apps. So yeah, we have apps right now that you can wear and they tell you, hey, you know, you took this many steps today. That wasn't

many steps. Maybe you take more steps, you burned that you burned approximately this many calories and you can enter on the internet your food consumption and it can tell you that really wasn't enough steps for that cheeseburger that you ate. Right, So they're they're already today food diary apps. You know, you have an app where you can put in the food you eat and it's supposed to help

keep track of your your nutritional consumption. But the problem with things like that is they rely on you, the user, and we're not very good at keeping up with stuff like that. I mean, it relies on you to remember to update it with all the stuff and also be honest when you're updating it, and it requires a lot of motivation on the part of the user, right, the user has to be motivated to continue to put in

this information. We find that the more we automate this, the more likely someone's going to stick with it because it's something that is happening passively in the background. They don't have to actively enter in that information. The more you ask of the user, the more dedicated they need to be for them to stick with it. Yeah. Of course, now you get to a certain point where it's like,

wait a minute, how exactly would that work? That might be a harder question to answer, Like how does the app get the data, the nutritional data on all the food you're eating? Right? You know, right? How does it know exactly what you're preparing proportions, right. It's it's an easy thing to do with prepackaged food because you're like, well, I put this microwave thing in the microwave and then

I ate it. That's pretty cut and dread. But it also might be an interesting thing that if this were a big enough deal in the future, restaurants could help cater to it. Right, So like a restaurant menu might say like, okay, you're about to order this, scan this QR code with your phone, and this will update your food diary with the nutritional information of the thing you're

about to eat. Although restaurants do frequently partner these days with those those food diary apps and give you the nutritional content, the hypothetical nutritional content of whatever they're making. That's that's very do something like that. I know of one fitness app where you could put in, uh, you know, various popular food items from from Normally it's like a national chain restaurant. It's usually uh, you know, maybe some of the more notable restaurants would also participate, but you're

in really good shape it as a national chain. And if you really want to see a fitness app, go boz erk tell it that you just ate a blooming onion by yourself and it'll it'll, it'll just wait a minute. So you do that every day at lunch, I'm curious what happens. Well, have you seen that scene from Return of the Jedi where job of the Hut is revealed for the first time? It's essentially my life. I am kidding, Jonathan,

I've never seen you eat a bloomen onion. No. I like to go into a very dark place when I do that, both mentally and physically. It's alone time. Yeah, which which place is it that has a steakhouse? What's the one at Chili is called? That one's the awesome blossom? Would you like to what are the other fried onion dishes? You can tell us, you know, let's not go into my personal life too deeply. Let's let's let's transition to

something else. How how about what if? What if I have all this cool technology in my kitchen and I've got all these great ingredients in my kitchen, but then I remember I don't know how to cook. Yeah, this is an idea I came up with that It sounds this might be the most far fetched of all of these, um but it's not totally impossible. I want to talk about real time cooking instruction. Um. So I've noticed that. So as I said, I'm the cook in our house and and a lot of times I want to try

a new dish. But that's a lot of times it's just easier to do something you've done before that you're familiar with. You know, I know all the steps. When you're trying a new dish, you spend a lot of time going back and forth. So I'll be doing what I'm chopping something or cooking in the pan and like, oh man, I need to go look at my computer, like how much of that was I supposed to put in?

Or how long was I supposed to cook it for? Right? Yeah, And it keeps You have to keep going back and forth, and that really sort of interrupts your rhythm, and and it's hard to get a good feel for it the first few times. It really you have to make a meal a good number of times before you really start getting comfortable with it. Um. Another thing is that cooking a lot of times involves techniques that are not very intuitive.

They're difficult. You gotta practice as them, and you don't always have somebody looking over your shoulder like you're in chef school, right, going, going, No, No, that it's not coating the back of the spoon. It's not ready yet. You need to keep cooking it longer exactly. So I was wondering if a kitchen full of smart devices could actually give you real time cooking instruction. So maybe instead of downloading the recipe, you download the I don't know

whatever file extension is for real time cooking. You upload that to your kitchen, and then it's ready to go. It's your coach now, so it tells you what you need here and what you need it's going, what are you doing, Dave, You're supposed to have hats now, and and depending on how sophisticated it is, could maybe even give you feedback right well. And there are some suggested uh social apps for this kind of thing where it's

not automated, it's actually other people. Uh. Some of them are made to be these kind of weird social gatherings like eight. I saw one that was a concept of a bowl and you could put various ingredients in the ball bowl, and then the bowl would allow you to connect with other people who have the same kind of bowl and the same ingredients in it. And then have conversations about what you were playing on doing with said ingredients and how you're going to prepare it, and maybe

you change your mind. You want to prepare the way this other person is preparing it, and you can have this interactive cooking experience remotely. I don't know how realistic that is. I've also seen um I've also sorry. What I imagined is you get the bowl and you put like eight onions in it, and you say, I plan on eating these like apples. What about you? No one, unless someone else has eight onions in their bowl, it's

not going to connect anyway. So it'll just be you by yourself, crying and eating onions, which is what I do on Tuesday nights anyway. The point being that, I've also seen a lot of technology saying that, you know, using things to to connect with actual chefs where you could get one on one time. I don't know how realistic that is, because that's a that's a huge time demand for experts, right, how do you get the experts

to debty lots of money? Yeah, for like the next six hours, you're going to sit here and whatever anyone wants to cook, even if it's macaroni and cheese. You were going to be here and tell them how to do it. Um, that's a possibility as well. But I see this happening in a in a combination of ways, both the automated way that you were suggesting, Joe, and in this kind of at least there there are a lot of pushes to move to a social kitchen, and I'll talk a little more about that a little bit

later too. I just want to say that I really don't want my kitchen to become a new source of chat roulette like that. That is absolutely what I don't want. I imagine that most of these will allow you to have a select group of people that you connect to if you weren't wanted to do so, and not force you to connect with with with naked cowboys also like to chevrolette. Like half of them are trolls. They're just like, no, you put the eggshells in Yeah, no, put them on

in there. Yeah they add fibers, great, Yeah, yeah, this is gonna be awesome. Well, Uh, did you want to say anything else about this, Joe before we transition to the next point. No, I actually did. I just wanted to follow up. I think I mentioned briefly, But one thing I think that would be the hardest thing about this. Say you had some kind of automated system in the kitchen that would give you real time feedback, is, um,

how does the kitchen keep track of what you're doing? Like, how does it actually know when you're doing something wrong? That seems like it would require a fairly sophisticated I don't know if it'd be visual identification with cameras or something. I think the most likely answer to this would be not to try and build out your kitchen with such sophisticated technology that could easily take keep track of what you were doing, but rather have an interface that was

maybe voice activated. So you've got perhaps a display in front of you that you're working on, and you're doing whatever the step is, and once you're done, you say next, and then it tells you what the next step is. That to me makes more sense than trying to build in an automated system that detects when you're finished. Right, So it might be less less complicated, less giving you feedback,

but more we're just kind of coaching along. Yeah, yeah, I mean the feedback would essentially be when you serve the dish to another human being and seeing whether or not they're able to choke it down. Yeah. So moving on to other stuff that we might see in the Kitchen of tomorrow. This is one that was briefly shown at the beginning of the video we saw. I think I have a feeling that the video we saw was an excerpt because it felt like it. Yeah, it felt

like it ended rather prematurely. But the home garden inside a kitchen, this is something I've seen several times where in the video we saw from nineteen sixty seven, it was just a shelving unit that had a bunch of plants on it, and the the domesticated mother, the poor woman who is still entrapped in the kitchen, despite the fact that everything is automated, ends up picking some flowers

for like a little center piece. But the idea has persisted about being able to grow herbs and vegetables within your kitchen so that you have fresh ingredients right at hand whenever you like. And there's still lots of different ways of implementing that. One of the ones I saw was there's a company called Electrolux, and if you ever want to see crazy concepts and prototypes, electro Lux has them all the time, and most of them, I'd say

a good number of them. The design ends up being incorporated into various technologies down the line, but you hardly ever see an actual like one to one product product. The concepts are usually pretty kind of kind of Jetson's e but one of the ones I saw what it looked like a microwave oven, but it was in fact a little home garden and had a ultra violet light inside of it that would provide the light needed for

plants to grow. It could be temperature controlled, it could actually control the intake of water so that you have an ideal growing environment for whatever you have in there. And then you just grow herbs so that you can use fresh herbs whenever you're cooking, which is a cool idea. I've also seen growing walls these or walls that actually have yeah, like herbs or vegetables on them, and in

fact it's all really cool. One where it was proposed that not only was it a growing wall, but it would use gray water from your sink to be the water for the plants, so you're not wasting as much water, you're actually reusing water. And uh and and depending upon that instead of just washing it down the drain. Just for the aesthetics of the cooking experience, I think it'd be nice to have more plants in the kitchen and growing wall and stuff like that, because cooking outside is

really nice. I like being around nature. But there's one major problem or to actually it's a weather and bugs. You're here in great things when you're cooking here in Atlanta. The weather that, especially in the summer months, can mean that you have either incredibly violent, although usually brief, thunderstorms, or you just have insanely humid hot days. Yeah, where you thought, wow, this is really nice for the maybe the first minute and a half, and then after that

you think this was a miserable experience. I never should have done this. But another thing that we talked about briefly was the idea of the kitchen as a gathering place, which I don't know about you guys. A lot of the parties I go to, they tend to everyone winds up in the kitchen. Yeah, the kitchen becomes like the place where most people spend a lot of time. There's one of my favorite parties to go to that's like the that's the location everyone ends up in the kitchen.

When you have thirty people in the kitchen that's designed to hold five, it gets pretty cozy. But the idea of the kitchen of the future maybe to help facilitate that further, to make to make the kitchen UH have certain integrated features that make it more of a natural

gathering place. And in the video I talked about a couple of these kind of like you know, a speaker system where you can have different kinds of sounds that compliment whatever the the event is, whether it's a a romantic dinner or maybe you're just by yourself and you want to do a little dance while you're making your food, or it's a big party and you want to have some lively music playing. And there are other elements to it as well. Then there's this virtual social interaction that

I am you know, we mentioned it earlier. I am a little skeptical of. And the reason I'm mainly skeptical of it is you guys know that when uh, you know, video phones were first starting to become a thing, everyone was predicting like, oh, this is going to be the phone of the future. All right, Well, we now have that technology integrated into practically everything, whether it's a smartphone, a laptop, computer, whatever. And maybe I'm just not the

right demographic for this technology. I don't know about you guys. But whenever I accidentally pressed the FaceTime button on my phone, because it's always accidental, I'm like, turn it off. They're gonna see my hideous face. Yeah, a really violent reaction. I have never I have never used video Skype to talk to someone casually. Whenever I've used it, it's in order for me to do to do an appearance on a podcast for example. Um, I've done that several times.

I've used Skype or Google Hangouts as a video chat for or for work purposes, or for appearing on a podcast. But I've never done it just to you know, call up my buddy. And part of that is because, uh, you know, I don't want to stage my calling area so that it looks so it looks the way I wanted to look. Every time I make a call. I feel like, what's the point of a phone if you can't be secretly naked or even or even overtly naked,

but at least they can't see you. And furthermore, I think that it is probably a technology that younger generations are more willing to adapt than us old fogies. That's true, and I'm still and maybe it is because of my age. I could be biased just because my age, uh that, but I still find it kind of interesting and uh unbelievable to think of these social features built into a kitchen and really being used that frequently. But maybe that's just because when I'm cooking, Like when I'm cooking, I

don't want anyone else in my kitchen at all. It is a constant source of irritation if someone comes into my kitchen and while I am cooking, because it means that at some point or another, and probably at multiple points, are gonna be in my way? Are they going to be distracted? So maybe it's just because that's also my method of cooking. Maybe if I were someone who liked to have lots of long conversations and interactions while I

was cooking, this would be something I would crave. So it's very possible that I'm just coming at this from a biased opinion. In fact, I'm kind of curious. I want our listeners who are you know who are also cooks, to let me know if they really would think that a social Like a virtual social interaction feature built into

a kitchen would be something they really want. Do you want to have something like maybe a wall in your kitchen that could also be a a FaceTime type display where you could talk to someone else while you're cooking. Is that something you would like? Or are you like me? Where you're you just you know, you want all human beings to cease to exist until you're finished cooking, and then they can come back. Um, I'm just curious. Anyway, I think it's time to talk about smart surfaces. Him. Uh,

it'd be a nice change of pace. Let's talk about that. Okay, the surface of the moon pretty smart. No, no smart surfaces for the kitchen. Uh. So this is an idea I sort of had based on something I saw on the internet, which was this proposed idea for something called the new Trima cutting board. Now this isn't a real technology, it's more just kind of like an imaginative design project. Yeah, um, but it it made me think about the idea of smart cutting boards and smart countertops. I mean, how cool

could that be. I really don't like using measuring cups in my kitchen. I mean, obviously I have to sometimes to get proportions right. But um, a lot of recipes call for weighing, right, sure, weighing things And also that's also you know if you have a scale that's taken up more space on your counter, and it's another thing to deal with, and it's it's also way more precise.

I will put this in, especially if you're baking, if you really want to be a chemist about it, you should be weighing rather than measuring in a measuring cup, because measuring cups are inherently flawed. V versus versus. Wait, if you want to be a soccer player, you'll just eyeball it anyway. Uh. The idea I was thinking about was cutting boards that weigh ingredients for you. So I mean you're preparing them on the or a countertop, either

one a smart surface that's pressure sensitive. It's got digital feedback on it, so maybe any part of it or just some parts of it can display feedback and you can create your little pile of diced vegetables or of flour, of butter or whatever it is, and it will tell you exactly how much you've got there. You don't need to be keep moving things between different containers and then cleaning containers to to measure them. It's all right there

on the surface that you're using. Another thing about a smart surface, like a smart cutting boarder countertop, would be the ability to help you clean it. It could identify, you know, here's where there's some chicken juice. You might have missed that. Uh, and it could maybe even clean itself, right if it had built in UV radiation. Sure. Yeah. I've seen a lot of concept designs that are kind of incorporating the features you're talking about now. Granted they're

all again concepts. It's all things like wouldn't it be awesome if we had this thing right now? From what I can tell it, I don't think anything about that is is you know, way out there. It seems all doable. Just the question is making it affordable. It's mostly the material science. I would think of having something sturdy enough to be a countertop or especially a cutting board, that is also going to be delicate enough to have that

kind of sensory technology inside. And and I have like even you know, a lot of these incorporate at least the concepts incorporated display, so it's like you're cutting on a display. Then you have to make sure that whatever the tempered glasses is incredibly scratch resistant because obviously a cutting board you're gonna be doing a lot of cutting on it. So yeah, there's some there's some material science challenges, definitely.

There is also a concept, and it might have been from the same project, that that some cutting board like this could evaluate how fresh the food on it is, like whether or not it's decaying a little bit, like like maybe you want to get a different cut of salmon, buddy like sort of stuff like it might look out for certain I don't know how it would do that. I guess it look out for certain chemical registered chemical. Yeah, yeah, I mean again, it's one of those where we talked about, oh,

it would be easy. It just has to look for this thing. Uh, you know, we don't necessarily have the implementation of how it would look for that thing. But it's this is the sort of stuff that engineers can look at and say, is this a feasible feature, How would we build this into a piece of technology, and how would we do it in a way that was practical and affordable. These are these are big questions and right now some of these questions may be unanswered because

we just don't have an answer for it yet. Right. Uh, We're gonna talk a little bit more in a minute about nutrient scanning and determining the real contents of a food if that's possible. But first, I see another interesting note about in SINC dishwashers. Yeah, this is just uh in sync, not the boy band we're talking about. It's inside a SINC. Oh oh, I thought you were talking about hiring them to wash your dishes. That I hear they are available, most of them aren't really doing much, right.

I was gonna make a joke, but then I realized that all the jokes I know, I don't know any of their songs, so I'd just be quoting a random boy band song. Anyway, the in SINC dishwashers, it sounds it is what it sounds like. There's a sink that you can put down a an application there where it's actually working as a dishwasher. It usually can wash a

small load of dishes within about five minutes. It really takes like the elbow grease element out of washing dishes, where if you don't have a full dishwasher and you're usually are only washing a couple, then it's it makes things easier. Um and There have been several concepts that were demonstrated even at things like c S, but have never made it to market, so that's a constant hope. One of the ones I looked at was on tree Hugger, and they were talking about it because it would be

a great way of conserving water. It's not doesn't use as much water as a conventional dishwasher, and you don't have to worry like if you are someone who only uses a few dishes, because maybe it's one or two people, then you don't want to be running a dishwasher all the time. And then at the same time, you don't want dishes just to keep piling up until you feel like you've justified, you know, running the dishwasher. This it's

kind of a solution for those folks. Um it's mostly been vaporware so far, but there's even been one and this was the one that's on tree Hugger that incorporates sensors that could detect if your dishes were still dirty or even if your produce still need to be washed. If you put produce into one of these, it could detect, well, are there any signs of bacteria on the produce? Are there in any signs of chemicals there, and if you hadn't washed the produce enough, it would alert you saying no,

you need to keep washing until until you produces clean. Yeah, so I thought that was a really cool idea. Also, Smart Faucet's kind of similar concept. G has shown off a concept like this. They showed off the concept it's at Ces as well. But again it's a concept and the idea is that for one thing, it'd be able to tell how hydrated you are based upon a finger scan. So let's say let's say that you've just come back from all those people who can't tell if they're thirsty.

Let's let's say that you're you've been fairly active and you're trying to make sure that you are hydrated, especially if you're about to go out again. Then it might be a good idea to check and see how you're doing. And you, you know, put your finger against this thing. It scans you, tells you whether or not you're hydrated, and if it's not, if you're not, just drink some

more water. But it also had some other features like it could dispense ice cubes directly from the faucet, so instead of you having to have an ice maker or whatever. It was this huge like round faucet that could dispense water or ice cubes or or yes, customized liquids. You

could actually have it hooked up to. Yeah. Like now, in that case you would I'm sure there would have to be some some unit underneath the the sink itself where you would hook up something, whether it was soda or juice or whatever, but you would have a button that would dispense whatever it was. Does it dispense salt if you're overhydrated? Know that they we have those, they're called salt shakers. We didn't have to make a dispenser for it. Um, But yeah, it was another cool thing.

And then there was an interactive cook top that Whirlpool showed off at CES two thousand fourteen that acted as a touch screen display as well as a cook top right right, using induction cooking, so that you can just have a flat surface, flat glassy surface, right And you have to have, of course, the right cookwear for induction cooking to work. But it does mean that you don't have to worry about the actual surface heating up. It's it's heating up the uh, the pan or rather than

the surface exactly through induction. And so then you have a touch screen display that's right there that can again kind of give you that step by step approach. Like we were talking about with the cutting board. What if you moved from cutting board to cook wear. Well, at that point it may not be convenient anymore for you to look over at the cutting board and say, all right, well, how long am I supposed to stir this? I've been stirring it long enough. That could all be incorporated into

one of these interactive cook tops. Or if you just really need to browse Pinterest while you're cooking, I mean, look at all these things that look way better than what I'm making. Yeah, that's that's another one. So there are a lot of different opportunities for these smart surfaces. Okay, so I want to talk about something that we sort of hinted at a minute ago, which is nutrients scanning.

So this is telling you what sort of ingredients, what sort of nutrients are in any particular type of food. It could be I mean, that's the question I wanted

to ask. Is it possible? Is it possible to have a device that tells you about the food you're about to eat, even if it's not something that came prepackaged with information from the manufacturers, or if it's something it's something that you yourself have not made that you don't know what's in it, or it's something you made but you just don't you know, I combined a bunch of ingredients.

I don't really know the full nutritional profile. Can you have a device that looks at some food and says, okay, here here the main ingredients in it. Here's how much salt it has. Here's how many calories, here's the saturated fat, here is you know, vitamins, and it breaks it all down for you. Sure is that possible? This would be important before we get into the possibility. This would be important for anyone who is one concerned about specific dietary

issues like allergens. That would be a big one. Right. So, let's say that you have ordered out and you got this food coming in and you realize, oh, I didn't think to ask if this was made with peanuts or something along those lines. And there's one way to find out, but that's a hard way, and I don't really want

to go to the hospital again. Right, and frequently, the way I mean traditionally, the way that we find out what exactly is in stuff like food, is that we burn the hell out of it and then analyze the ashes, yes, or or or the light that has given off one wallet burns. Yeah, that's a spectroscopy where we end up mass spectrometry right, yes, specifically yes, where we ionize something by bombarding it with electrons and then analyzing it. That's not really an option for a dish that you plan

on ingesting. Also not something that you might necessarily have convenient in your kitchen. You may not have an advance laboratory. I don't think that that kind of thing is going to be used in homes anytime soon. But interestingly, you don't atomize your food before you eat it. You you you found that's the next level of food snobbery, right, Joe. But you found an interesting device that supposedly, at least the claim is that it can give you some information

about the food that you have in front of you. Yeah. So the device is called the tell Spec and it is if you you can go look it up online. And they've got sort of promotional videos and they've got a website. They had an Indigo Go campaign which they campaigned I believe for a hundred thousand dollars and they far surpass their goals, so they got a lot of funding and they say they're moving toward having this available

for consumers. And it's called the tell spec. It is supposedly a device that allows you to analyze the nutritional profile of food by aiming a little key chain thing and it looks almost like a garage door open. Yeah, it's a little thing you hold in your hand and it communicates with your smartphone. Okay, so here's how it works. You take the thing and you aim it at the

food you want to analyze. So it shoots out some light a bunch of photons at the food, and then photons come back from the food, and the photons that come back, the energy of those photons will help tell you something about the atomic and molecular composition of the food you have aimed it at. And then once your receiver gets all of that data, it goes and communicates with something called cloud Analysis Engine. This would be a

thing hosted by the service itself. It wouldn't be on your phone, uh, and they would sort of compare the profile that you've just uploaded with all of the data they have about different types of foods and organic compounds, and say, what are we probably looking at here? So it's saying like, yeah, there's peanuts, there's some rice based noodles, there's uh, some tamarind. You're probably eating pad tie. Yeah,

well you're probably eating peanuts tamarin. Like, it'll tell you those things, I think, or and come back and say it and the nutritional content of all of those things is this and this and this right supposedly that is how it will work. Now that sounds pretty incredible. Yeah, really incredible. Some people would say it sounds so incredible, how could it possibly be true? Uh? We read at least one interesting critical analysis of it right over at

review dot com. They talked with some experts in the field of analysis and discussed whether or not this was a real listic implementation, whether it was realistic to use the it's called a Raymond or Raman spectroscopy, and that the the critique was that one, it will essentially give you information about whatever the light happened to hit. So if you happen to be eating a food that's homogeneous all the way through, then you're good to go, because

it's going to give you an accurate reading. But if it's something that's a mix, like maybe you're having a salad or something, then whatever it happens to be hitting, that's the information it's going to get back. If there are other elements in that food that we're not in that scan, then it doesn't have the information there. It can't tell you about it. It can't tell you really about a pie. If you try to scan a pie, it will tell you about what's in the top of

the crust, that's right. So you might say, you might say, like butter and flour and eggs, and I don't know what else is there. That's it, buddy, And you might think, wow, that sounds like a terrible pie. But it's because it can't. It can't penetrate beyond that, so you're just getting whatever

is at the surface. Right. But with that caveat, they did say, based on the expert they talked to, that it does seem like this is doable, like you can actually use this technique to get a realistic profile of what the organic compounds you're looking at are. But there is another thing we should note, which is that it

will probably rely heavily on that thing. I mentioned the cloud analysis engine because it has to go talk to mom, It needs to go compare what it found to what the computer back at home base actually knows about different food profiles. Right, So if you have something like a truly exotic ingredient that hasn't been profiled, or perhaps resembles a different profile, then you might be essentially confusing the system. Or it might be that there's a lot of variation

even within common foods. Um so. According to in April piece on Bloomberg business Week, the company currently has profiles of fifteen hundred foods in their database, and they plan to expand that to a million profiles. So, you know, don't know, but if if they really do that, that's interesting. I'm just scared that they will get to the point where people can point those things at me and then they'll come back and just say jerk face or or job of the hut, or or like or like Lauren

is made of twizzlers. Yeah, yeah, that could be terrifying. Well, no, I think if they scanned you, they'd get bloom and onion blossom, thank you, sorry, sorry. And so the one last question is are we going to have food replicators? And we already talked about that. We did. So if you're interested in the idea of food replicators, go back and listen to the podcast Lauren and I did about food replicators from April fo Yeah, basically it's unlikely, right,

but that doesn't stop people from trying. No. No, I mean, if you think you can make a food replicator, be my guest, especially if you if you surprise us. All there's a Nobel prize in that. Please go for it, don't hold back, and I will personally buy you as sandwich or at least replicate you one. So yeah, probably won't have food replicators, maybe ever. Definitely not anytime soon. But you know what, we will have three D printed food. Yes, I mean we've got that now. It'll it'll be it'll

be gloriously mushy. Yeah. What I'm imagining is the great three D printed food adhesion failure problem where you're trying to print a pizza, but the pizza keeps peeling up and turning into a pizza ball that rocks back and forth. While so it's awesome, it's still okay. Yeah, that actually sounds kind of good right now. Pizza ball. Yeah, you can tell that Joe has been playing with a three D printer and had a lot of hands on experience recently. Well,

we're gonna wrap this up. We realize that this has been a particularly long episode, but that's because, you know again, Kitchen of the future is one of those things that people have really been fascinated by for for decades. Everyone likes to predict, and it's because a lot of a lot of proactivities centers in and around the kitchen. So

are we correct with our guesses? Who knows? If you guys have any predictions of your own you want to share with us, join us on Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus. Our handle at all three is f W Thinking and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go Places,