Kitchen R&D

There's not been enough cooking on here recently so here's a small adjustment in the right direction. We finished watching Dan Cruickshank's Marvels of the Modern Age (come on BBC TV, programme pages please) last night - it was a series on modernist architecture on BBC2 a couple of months ago and in the last of the series he was looking at the future. After visiting Dubai and Shanghai he visited MIT in Boston where he was shown their "kitchen of the future".

• Plates on demand - discs of plastic are moulded into whatever shape you need that evening. You then recycle them when you've washed up...
• ...which you speed up by having a rubber sink into which you can just throw things.
• A system that projects the contents of the fridge onto the outside of the door, so you don't have to open it. It also projects a snowstorm onto the door, while playing wind sounds, if you fail to close the fridge. Our fridge just beeps.
• "Augmented cabinetry" that keeps an inventory of the contents of your kitchen cabinets, with handles that light up at the appropriate stage of the recipe.

Their research page includes the publication: "Counter Intelligence: Augmented Reality Kitchen."

I'm not sure I'm ready for this.