Kitchen gadgets: they clutter up your worktops, take ages to clean and your kids will tire of them before you’ve mastered how to use them. Just say no, urge the Money-Saving Amateurs

The younger members of the Money-Saving Amateurs’ household are in constant rebellion against our lack of kitchen gadgets. Everyone else, they say, has a microwave/rice cooker/pasta maker/Magimix/Nespresso machine/air fryer/bread maker/waste disposal unit/boiling water tap or whatever other daft gizmo has been dreamt up by a product development department in America.

But we MSAs proudly hold against the gadgets, believing them to be a total waste of time, space and human labour. This is not to say we haven’t succumbed in the past. For example, there was the waffle maker. For a week, we were in thrall to this wondrous machine. We studied the instruction booklet carefully and marvelled at the quality of waffles that emerged from it. But a year later, we realised that no one had used it again, and we consigned it to the tip. And there was the Nutribullet. Again, we binged on various smoothies for two weeks and then the bulky, plastic, electricity-using object was returned to the cupboard, rarely to be seen again.

It was the same, actually, with the wok. It arrived and we used it with great excitement. Once. Then we noticed a year later that it was sitting at the back of the cupboard – forgotten, unused, abandoned and taking up valuable space.

One objection to the gadgets is the huge amount of washing up they entail. Kitchen mixer bits get food stuck all over the place. Once washed and dried, they then have to be stored and reassembled. Then they break. What a waste of everyone’s time.

I’ve been to households with several coffee-making devices and machines, some resembling the sort of thing you see in cafés which are designed for producing several hundred coffees a day. If only they knew that a Bialetti or two is all you need.

I would go even further than the above and throw out the garlic crusher and the salad spinner. Again, they’re both awkward and time-consuming to wash up and the job can be done just as well with a knife or pestle and mortar in the case of the garlic, or a tea towel in the case of the salad spinner.

Some of the new gadgets have taken things to a new level of absurdity and rely on phone apps. There’s a rechargeable meat thermometer, for example, which requires a smartphone link-up. There are some really mad ones. How about the electric potato peeler, boiled egg peeler or hands-free electric egg cooker?

All of these gadgets are the result of a wrong philosophy. It’s the idea that the more machinery we have, the more free time we get. But even way back in 1848, John Stuart Mill wondered how much time labour-saving devices actually saved, once the maintenance is taken into account: “It is questionable,” he wrote, “if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”

Do yourself a favour. Chuck out the gadgets.

This article appears in the current edition of the Idler.

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