My girls

I have read several recent blog posts on must-have kitchen equipment. Occasionally I find myself drooling over the somewhat pornographic images of KitchenAid stand mixers, Cuisinart food processers, and various expensive and elusive seasonings. Most of the time I find myself getting a bit ticked off. Seriously, you call yourself a "foodie" and you cannot find a way to make a good dish without thousands of dollars worth of gadgets? My grandmother consistently whipped out delicious holiday feasts with two dull knives and a rusty spoon. Maybe I am exaggerating, but have you ever noticed how the best food traditions come from the most impoverished regions? People without microplanes or LeCruset enamelware? Furthermore, in this display of wealth you loose the entire point. Cooking for me is not about showing off, it is about hanging with friends and family and enjoying ourselves.

My own collection of kitchen paraphernalia is cobbled together from myriad sources. I have a couple of pots from Marshall's,  two great chef's knives from TJ Maxx, a strainer from Target. I do not have a $300+ mixer but rather a good hand blender and a couple of strong arms. I do not have a Cuisinart, but a hand-me-down food processor that works well enough to churn out a good batch of hummus. This is the type of kitchen that many (most?) of us have, and it works perfectly!

Here is one of my girls:

This pot is a Kuhn-Rikon that I picked up at TJ Maxx for $35 a couple of months ago. In addition to working well for soup, I have used it for pasta dishes, chili, stews, and a divine Coq au vin. The tempered glass lid (in the background) allows me to cover it and put it in the oven. She stands proudly next to my cast iron skillet (which I use for nearly everything else) in the kitchen. I think that in the quest to be all matchy-matchy or fancy people often forget that sometimes it is just not necessary to go beyond the basics. I find it actually comical when I see a kitchen all decked out in expensive gadgetry when I know that half of it has never been used.

I see this false idolatry in the world of Physical Anthropology as well. In particular, there is a big fancy machine in France called the Synchrotron. Seriously, it sounds like a god-damned Transformer. The Synchrotron is great in that it allows us to see the microscopic internal structure of teeth (and bone) without actually slicing through them. This is extremely useful if you want to look at a priceless fossil that can never be put back together again. Well, my relationship with the Synchrotron is similar to my relationship with the KitchenAid. It can do some incredibly interesting things, and if I had access to one I would certainly love to use it, but my research will be just fine without it. BUT - There is great science to be done without access to perhaps one of the most expensive bits of imaging technology known to man.

I feel that at this point I sound like a cranky undergrad when confronted with a complicated, jargon-filled article in class. "I don't belong to the club!" In all seriousness though, my larger point is that there should not be an inordinate amount of awe and worship for these big, fancy machines. Denying federal grants for exciting research that happens to not use such equipment makes no sense; This is as discouraging to research as KitchenAids are to new cooks. People should be working with the Synchrotron though. Even better, people should be working on making it more widely available. But I argue that it will be a long time before there will be a Synchrotron in every kitchen, er, laboratory, so let's wield our old cast iron skillets, mismatched knives, and hand-me-down food processors and make something tasty!