Kitchen Bytes

Abstract

This article discusses the history of kitchen computers and robots in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Kitchen computers are programmable devices located in kitchens that perform logical operations and are often equipped with software to aid in cooking. However, as discussed in this article, marketers and journalists tend to anthropomorphize kitchen computers in descriptions and discuss these kitchen computers as if they are robots. Robots are machines that are programmable by a computer, which can carry out a complex series of actions automatically. Kitchen robots, therefore, are related to kitchen computers yet are not the same thing. In the cultural imaginary, including in movies, television, and advertisements, kitchen robots represent the desire for leisure, luxury, and a reprieve from the burdens of cooking. However, the development of these technologies and their surrounding discourse were more complicated than films and computer magazines made them out to be. Kitchen robots and computers are typically coded as white and female. Their marketing promotes a retrofuturist vision in which outdated gender models are projected onto contemporary—or even emerging—technologies that reinscribe sexist, racist, and heterosexist stereotypes. While the promise of kitchen computers and robots seems progressive, these technologies do not threaten the gendered division of household cooking. Instead, these devices offered women a reprieve from the drudgery of kitchen tasks through a capitalist solution: a product buys a woman’s reprieve rather than upending the nuclear heterosexual family and redefining household roles that create a more equitable division of housework.