Rory Sutherland: Why don’t Americans have kettles?

I enjoy reading reviews of kitchen gadgetry. Clever new kitchen products are often under-appreciated. Many rituals around food preparation are intended to signal personal effort, rather than to produce edible food with a minimum of fuss. There is hence a tendency towards bogus authenticity among amateur cooks which causes them to eschew labour-saving devices in favour of doing everything in a faux-Victorian fashion.

Professional chefs, who must produce food in quantity every day, do not suffer this delusion: one Michelin-starred chef, when asked to name his favourite item of kitchen equipment, replied ‘the microwave’. Two new devices I particularly recommend are the air-fryer and the soupmaker. Both are commonplace in parts of Asia but were until recently unknown in Britain. Technological adoption is often strangely localised. Or, as William Gibson has it, ‘The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.’ For instance, browsing through Virginia Postrel’s column on cookery equipment on the US website Bloomberg.com,