Wi-Fi enabled gadgets and appliances have the potential to make cooking safer, easier, and a lot more fun. But some smart kitchen devices aim to solve problems that don’t exist. And these smart gadgets make your cooking experience stupider.
By the way, we’re not dunking on inventions just because they sound silly. The Squatty Potty sounds silly, but we are physically and mentally obsessed with that beautiful piece of plastic. We’re setting our sights on devices that add frustration and nonsense to the kitchen without solving any problems along the way.
HAPIfork: The IOT Fork
The HAPIfork is a smart fork that vibrates when you’re eating too fast. According to HAPI, “satiety is felt after about 20 minutes” of eating. So, if you take twenty minutes to eat dinner, you’ll eat less food. Naturally, the HAPIfork can connect to your phone and show you stats, like how many forkfuls of food you eat per minute. You can compare these stats with friends, but sadly, you can’t compete in online slow-eating competitions.
As far as we can tell, the HAPIfork is a rebranded version of the Slow Control fork. And in the words of Slow Control, this smart fork forces you to “naturally adopt the right tempo,” so you can “eat more slowly and masticate more.” We could all use a bit of mastication in our lives.
We’re not sure if these ideas about mastication and satiety are backed by science. Maybe the idea is that your dinner will get so cold you’ll just give up on eating it—that makes sense. We tried to read the scientific “bibliography” that HAPI links to on its website, but the page is broken and written in French. That’s a bummer.
GeniCan: The Smart Garbage Can Attachment
The GeniCan is a Wi-Fi connected barcode scanner that attaches to your trash can. It keeps track of what you throw away and automatically creates a grocery list, because why not? You can even program the GeniCan to automatically order your groceries from Amazon, if you’re comfortable giving a garbage-sniffing robot your credit card info.
We know what you’re thinking, “What if my trash doesn’t have a bar code?” Well, you can just hold your orange peels in front of the GeniCan and yell “ORANGES.” Then, it’ll add oranges to your grocery list. Super.
iSommelier: A Smart Decanter That Bubbles Your Wine
Everyone knows that decanting wine is a difficult, time-consuming process. First, you need to pour wine from a bottle into a decanter, making sure any sediment stays in the bottle. Then you pour the wine from the decanter into a glass and serve.
Yes, a very difficult process. And that’s where the iSommelier smart decanter comes in. It’s a smart gadget that aerates your wine using one of those oxygen bubblers for fish tanks. That way, your wine gets exposed to a bunch of oxygen—more than it would be exposed to if you left the decanter sitting out in the open for two hours (which, by the way, is a great way to catch flies).
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