Everyone becomes an idiot. That’s because they have no opportunity to better themselves. Case in point [link may not work, it's WSJ]:

A low-cost, easy-to-use piece of digital technology could make millions of people more productive in their everyday lives. If you don’t have one in your home, it’s another victory for a small cabal that suppresses these devices every way it can.

I know this sounds like “The Da Vinci Code.” But believe me, it’s real.

The device is the digital kitchen scale. These aren’t the cheap plastic scales of questionable accuracy that have long been sold to dieters. They are, instead, sleek pieces of battery-powered electronics with LED displays and high-precision results. Thanks to the Chinese manufacturing boom and constantly declining prices for computer chips, digital kitchen scales can now be found for as low as $30.

The machines are a godsend to two often overlapping groups of people: the lazy and the precise.

They help make cooking — baking especially — a snap. Stick a bowl on the scale, add the flour you need, reset the scale to zero, add your sugar, and so on. You can work through most ingredients like this in a single bowl, quickly, to a high degree of accuracy and without having a lot of measuring cups to wash up when you’re done.

There is just one thing you need to make this bit of kitchen magic come true: the weight of each ingredient of a recipe, as opposed to just their volumes. So, the first line of the recipe for brownies might be: “Flour, 1½ cups (6.3 ounces; 180 grams).”

This is where the conspiracy comes in. The small clique known as “cookbook publishers” refuses to provide those weights, despite cookbook authors’ wishing they would. Check the cookbooks in your home; chances are they don’t list weights. Most of the baking books at the big Borders near my home were similarly weightless.

Publishers don’t put weights in recipes for the simple reason that they think you’re stupid.

Compare that to this article in Rolling Stone on the disgusting practices of Smithfield, the country’s largest pork producer. And check out who shows up on the front page of Smithfield’s website, offering recipes. I’m willing to bet she doesn’t even know what a scale is, let alone has weight measurements in any of her “cookbooks”.

Tags: cookbook publishers, Kitchen Scales, Paula Dean, Smithfield

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 10:15 am and is filed under Humor & Culture, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.