Invisible touch
The kitchen of the future, running, corn
Hello! I’m Adrienne, and you’ve opened the Local Technique newsletter, which comes to you from a dirt road in Vermont, where I’m lumbering past streams and apple trees, trying to remember how to run.
Back in the content mines of NYC, we’ve just wrapped up the first wave of the holiday commerce season. It’s never not weird to be making Reindeer Martinis and Boozy Eggnog Layer Cake in August, but thanks to AI, live Zoom feeds and corporate sponsorship, it’s more surreal than ever. I feel disjointed, and I’ve come to this rural oasis to throw myself on the mercy of friends whose company and food and mere existence will restore my health. Despite the intensely physical nature of cooking for camera, I’m forgetting how to use my body at all, or at least my brain is forgetting how to deploy it in any sort of natural direction.
Food photo shoots (the ones done for money, in America) usually take place in quasi-residential kitchen studios outfitted with the newest, most elite appliances. Sometimes manufacturers supply them for free in exchange for publicity. It’s been like this since the Cold War, but sometime between 2008 and now, what counts for elite technology has accelerated in the opposite direction of what any good cook wants, needs, or has ever asked for.
Consider the oven: you probably want one that gets hot, stays hot, has intuitive controls, doesn’t interfere with the flow of your actions, and isn’t too hard to clean. Think again, peasant. The future is now, and today you’ll be baking in a $3000 oven-shaped app from GE that connects to satellites and comes with a touchscreen menu of a dozen preloaded recipes that link directly to your Kroger shopping cart (login required).
It’s fun to imagine what kind of focus group named Oven Baked Beet Chips and White Fish Provencal to the final cut. Norwegian zookeepers maybe, or just some desperate Kroger department managers dreaming of moving their most difficult surplus. Or maybe I’m overthinking it. Despite its sleek look, the gameplay of the GE Cafe wall oven feels so clunky and random that it’s hard to believe any process more refined than an afternoon of cornhole guided its R&D.
Still, if you can keep your mind calm and your fingers dry enough to navigate the menus, there IS a chance you’ll be able to bake a cake that doesn’t require in-app purchases. Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to make the frosting. I regret to inform you that today, in the future, this will take place in a wifi-enabled stand mixer, a matte behemoth that flashes a stripe of blue-violet light while it’s mixing, like an anglerfish digesting its prey. You will ask yourself: why could a stand mixer possibly need a feature that allows it to be operated remotely by wifi? Driverless buttercream? And why is the paddle so hard to detach?
Somehow, miraculously, you’ll manage to detach it. Now your hands are a mess, and the clock is ticking; you still have twenty shots to get through, and the client is staring through their Slack window, clicking at you like The Predator. You’ll race to the sink, where the real horror awaits. Here, the faucet has an optical sensor that’s supposed to turn the water on and off when you wave your hand under its neck. It works about as well as every optical-sensor faucet ever: 60% chance of success, if the wind is right. You’ll wave, you’ll wave, you’ll curse, you’ll relent, you’ll reach a buttery hand to the manual lever that overrides the sensor. At this exact moment the sensor will wake up and shut off the water a millisecond before your hand reaches it. On the very worst days, you’ll accidentally activate the carbonation feature and hot seltzer will come out.
If you’re human, working all day with appliances like these will start to feel like brain damage. Cause and effect will cease to seem real. Your cortisol will spike, your cells will inflame, you may break out in hives. You’ll feel a little like an animal in a CAFO, unable to exercise any agency within the unnatural systems you’re forced to require for survival.
When my fingers swelled so much that my rings stuck like shackles and I found myself clucking like a leghorn, I knew it was time to escape. I took the train to Boston, borrowed a car, and drove to remote Vermont, where I could recover for a week among the farmers and cooks who live untouched by the invisible hand of delusional technology.
On the three-hour trip from Somerville to the Northeast Kingdom, a weird realization set in: driving was making me feel normal again. I was starting to exhale for the first time in weeks. When I put my foot on the gas, the car went faster. When I pressed on the brake, it slowed down. I flicked a lever and the blinker came on. Turning the key one way made the engine start; turning the other way made it stop. No hot seltzer in sight. Interacting with a machine whose parts functioned as an extension of my body and will was as shocking and therapeutic as a cold plunge.
And now, I’m running. On my first day in the country, I couldn’t even remember how. I blame the appliances. Working with so-called smart technology clips the strings that connect your actions to your own brain and reassembles your limbs into a new kind of puppet, a body rigged to chase mirages on a treadmill running at the speed of profit. Out on the real road, surrounded by the slow technology of nature, I kept tripping over my own feet.
But I’m running now, and it’s not in some quest for peak fitness, but for simple enjoyment and immunity against an unnatural life. I smell the trees, I hear the birds, I feel the sun. The point isn’t speed; the point is just to engage with ecosystems in a visceral way because it tethers you to happiness and sanity. Running very slowly, just fast enough to raise your heart rate and flush away your thoughts and push fresh oxygen through your lungs, repairs the broken puppet strings.
Food has the same effect. Just last week, in NYC, I was losing my mind, pouring food dye into pots of fake white chocolate, making cartoon fudge (it’s trending!) for TikTok. (If you happen to be one of my clients and are reading this, I love you! You aren’t the problem; three shoots last month had the same brief.)
Here in rural Vermont, among farmers and cooks, no one’s livelihood depends on Neon Brite Yellow Liqua-gel or mass hallucination. Last night I had corn so good I think it reset my limbic system (Paquet Farms, Barre, VT). The kernels went in a raw salad, and now, this morning, run complete, I’m sipping broth made by simmering the leftover cobs with a touch of salt and smoked chili, watching loons on the lake.
It’s all restored feelings of natural intelligence. I’m cooking food that makes me feel creative and alive. Earlier this summer I started buying duck fat from the duck guy at the greenmarket and I’ve been scrambling eggs for post-run breakfast tacos in it ever since. Here’s how I’ll do it today, in corn season: heat a cast iron pan, warm a tortilla or two, add duck fat and a pinch of cumin seeds and let them sizzle (pause to smell; the smell of cumin frying is insanely good, pure aromatherapy, always and forever). Whisk a few eggs with salt (maybe even a little soy sauce, don’t tell Texas), lower the heat and scramble. Add some raw corn kernels at the very end. Fold it into tortillas, hot sauce to taste, and remember what the world is supposed to be for.