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Technology


THE MICROWAVE MAKES NO SENSE

Every kitchen appliance is getting smart—except one.

By Jacob Sweet

Illustration by The Atlantic
September 21, 2023
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Matthew Kressy likes to think that he owns a first-rate microwave. The founding
director of MIT’s integrated design and management program, Kressy lets his
experience inventing gadgets guide his purchasing decisions. But when he needed
a new microwave a few years ago, the best he could do was the Panasonic
NN-SD861S. Instead of poking at a touch pad to set the cook time, he twists a
dial. “It’s kind of fun to use,” he told me, “but it’s not much better than
anything else.” His 1.2-cubic-foot unit looks essentially the same as every
other countertop microwave available to the average American consumer. It is
large. It is rectangular. Its right side is dominated by numerous buttons that
could be removed at no loss to society. And it has the same basic look as
microwaves from a decade ago, the decade before that, and the one before that.





Not only are microwaves ugly, but they are also not particularly user-friendly:
My own Sunbeam microwave has a “Potato” button that sets the cook time to five
minutes for one potato—irrespective of spud size—and then adds 2 minutes and 30
seconds for each additional potato, up to the device’s arbitrary maximum of four
potatoes. Aside from the notorious popcorn setting (which some microwave-popcorn
instructions specifically tell you not to use), there are additional useless
buttons for “Pizza,” “Beverage,” “Frozen dinner,” and “Reheat.” After four
years, I’m still not sure whether it’s possible to set a cook time at an
interval of fewer than 30 seconds; I just press “+30 Sec” repeatedly and watch
to make sure nothing explodes.



The microwave is a baffling contradiction: a universal, time-saving appliance
that also seems trapped in time. You can now easily find plenty of sleek and
technologically advanced dynamic precision cookers, stand mixers, and coffee
machines, among many other appliances. But somehow, the microwave, a device used
in nearly every American home, has responded with a resigned shrug.



It may not seem like it today, but the microwave oven is a grand success story
of American innovation. The first one, invented by a scientist at the military
contractor Raytheon in 1945, weighed 750 pounds, stood more than five feet tall,
and cost at least $2,000. Some 20 years later, the company released a countertop
version that cost $500, pushing the United States into an era of frozen dinners
that could be quickly defrostable. Most of today’s microwaves work in the same
basic way as these early devices: They reflect microwaves produced by a
magnetron around a cooking chamber. When the wavelengths strike the food
molecules inside, they vibrate them and create heat. The turntable came soon
after, and by the 1980s, it was included in basically every microwave. The
appliances became smaller, too, but then the changes largely stopped. “For the
last several decades, there have not been a lot of new paradigm-shifting
innovations in the microwave oven,” says John F. Gerling, the president of the
International Microwave Power Institute, a group that advocates for microwave
safety and performance standards.





Part of the problem is that most companies don’t seem to be trying very hard to
innovate on the device. The microwave is notorious for heating unevenly,
rubberizing meats, and failing to brown or crisp. Even Kressy’s colleagues who
also design and develop products, he said, “are skeptical and only use, like,
two features on the microwave.” I asked five of the biggest microwave
manufacturers in the U.S. about whether microwaves have advanced, and heard back
from only Bree Lemmen, Whirlpool’s kitchen brand manager. She wrote in an email
that “one of the biggest innovations in the microwave space over the past few
decades is the Whirlpool® low profile microwave, which combines the power of a
standard microwave and a vent hood into a sleek, compact appliance that mounts
under your cabinets in place of a range hood.” Awesome.


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The microwave’s stifled evolution is not solely due to lack of effort. A few
plays on the standard design—retro-looking ones, square ones, multifunction
ones—do exist, but they haven’t altered the default, which has become the
scourge of interior designers. Jan Rutgers, a kitchen designer and educator,
told me that appliances are common kitchen centerpieces. Ranges are easy to
showcase. Fridges too. How about microwaves? “Oh, no, no, no, no,” she said.
“I’ve designed more than 1,000 kitchens. I don’t think I’ve ever had the
microwave as a focal point.” If space permits it, Rutgers generally directs
clients to tuck their microwave in a back kitchen or a butler’s pantry.

And considerably better methods of microwave heating have long been available.
In 1988, Panasonic debuted “inverter technology,” which allows the microwave to
cook more precisely at lower power levels and prevent overheating. (Conventional
microwaves operate at maximum power or not at all; when set to half power, they
cycle on and off at equal intervals.) Lots of different companies now sell
inverter microwaves, but the technology’s slightly elevated price has kept it
lagging behind the conventional microwave from decades before. More ambitious
microwaves have fared worse. General Electric’s Trivection oven—essentially a
combination of microwave, convection oven, and conventional oven—flopped so
badly that it became a gag on 30 Rock. “That’s too bad,” Gerling told me,
“because I thought it was really cool.”



Part of the problem is that the microwave’s limitations are inherent to its
cooking mechanics; without added technology (like the microwave crisping
sleeve), it can’t heat the air around food enough to make its outside crispy.
But a key reason microwaves have stagnated is that they have been optimized not
for performance, but for price. A single Midea factory in Guangdong, China,
reportedly produces the budget microwaves for Toshiba, Black+Decker, General
Electric, Whirlpool, Panasonic, and many other brands. Even if changing a keypad
or scaling back on dubiously useful buttons raises the microwave’s price by,
say, $20, that difference could seem pointless to consumers who are, in large
part, expecting the bare minimum. A $350 Whirlpool low-profile over-the-range
microwave might not seem worth it when it heats just like a $70 one. Keli
DiRisio, an assistant professor of design at the Rochester Institute of
Technology, told me that when her family built their house, she knew exactly
what features she wanted in her oven and fridge—but “on the microwave, it’s
like, whichever one fits the budget,” she said. “It wasn’t as big of a deal.”



For the microwave to improve, people would have to want it to improve, believing
that their appliance could produce something delectable and not just … warm. I
cook my daily oatmeal in the microwave not because it tastes better than on the
stovetop (it doesn’t), but because I don’t want to clean a pot every day. “You
need a cultural moment,” Jim Young, the lead industrial designer at the firm
Fresh Consulting, told me. “You need people who are going to make it something
special.” For sous vides, high-performance blenders, and artisanal pizza ovens,
that moment has come. For the microwave, it has not. People are not yet allured
by the promise of inverter technology, the ingenuity of microwave-specialized
cookware, the splendor of strategic defrosting. “I don’t know if it’s a losing
battle,” DiRisio said, “because we’ve been so conditioned on what it is for all
these decades.”



In some ways, that might be changing. During the early pandemic, culinary voices
challenged the lowly reputation of microwave cooking. In 2021, the celebrity
chef David Chang co-authored Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying
About Recipes (And Love My Microwave) with the food reporter Priya Krishna,
writing that the microwave is “the single best piece of equipment in a kitchen.”





Gerling hopes that someday, the microwave can regain the status it held in its
earlier days. He’s excited about new solid-state technology, which allows for a
level of precision cooking so profound that one company, Miele, claims it can
cook fish buried in a block of ice without melting the ice, or veal tenderloin
in beeswax without melting the beeswax. Currently, it costs nearly $10,000 and
seems to be advertised toward a kind of Marvel-supervillain home chef who
contemplates serving ice-encased bass. Still, Gerling is optimistic about its
future, calling it “the holy grail of microwave power.” After decades of
stagnation, perhaps the microwave will join the legions of tech products whose
evolution now seems inevitable, as is so often the promise in Silicon Valley.
Until then, I will continue mashing “+30 sec,” praying that my daily oats don’t
overflow.





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