“At every occasion, I’ll be ready for a funeral”
The violence and unprecedented lawlessness of events generating world media headlines in the first week of this year have delayed this long-overdue eulogy. They also sharpened the risk that any further delay is likely to result in its never being written at all as the remainder of our lives from this day on gets consumed by a cavalcade of calamity with seemingly no sign of ebb.
I don’t own a toaster. I never did.
This is not because I am opposed to toasters per se. On the contrary, the toaster, considered as ding an sich, is nearly perfect. Reservations arise only once it must be placed in the kitchen.
During the Christmas holiday I stayed in two homes, both of which had kitchens equipped with toasters. I also happened to be in places where bakeries were producing sliced breads from naturally leavened doughs made with minimally processed grains in an earnest attempt to return bread to what we have been told is its nutritionally intact origins.
This happy coincidence allowed me to enjoy excellent toast with properly browned exteriors and appropriately moist interiors without having to engage the underlying problem at all.
That problem is fundamentally aesthetic. And it is without a solution; not that the best minds are working on one.
A kitchen is a field of claims against finite counter space. Each tenancy must plead its case and prevail over competing claims for scarce real-estate.
Kitchen size, though a factor, is neither determinative nor resolutory as countertop sprawl produces other inefficiencies that create a somewhat different but no less serious aesthetic failure.
The toaster’s singularity of purpose renders it ontologically expensive. It refines one narrow function while duplicating capabilities already distributed across other, more versatile instruments. The cost of granting a toaster a leasehold on counter space is the persistent visual and conceptual noise of its conspicuous redundancy.
Redundancy can, in certain circumstances, be justified as a failsafe. This is not one of them. Even if you believe toast is a system whose failure carries serious consequences, most modern kitchens already contain multiple heat sources capable of producing an acceptable slice: ovens, toaster micro-ovens, air fryers, panini presses.
That none of these perform the task quite as well is beside the point. I grant without hesitation that a toaster produces better toast. Though the difference is real, it is not clear whether it is incremental or categorical. Regardless, excellence alone is insufficient to compel tenancy.
To qualify for countertop placement, an appliance must be integral to daily production and it must demonstrate that centrality by displacing existing tools rather than accumulating alongside them.
There are, of course, people for whom the difference in outcome is not marginal. For such people, crumb structure, moisture gradient, crust brittleness, starch gelatinization, and repeatability are not incidental pleasures but governing concerns. In their kitchens, the toaster’s redundancy does not disappear. It persists with the same gravity and poise of the proverbial elephant in the room. Like a grand piano in a tight apartment uninhabited by a pianist. If lucky, the disturbance its presence elicits is obscured by distance from its doppelgängers and the segmentation and layout of the countertop, cabinetry and other appliances.
There are, also, people who are blind to this disturbance, either ab initio or after having been desensitized. Over the holidays, I visited with relatives who live comfortably among redundancies: a built-in Miele coffee machine, a plumbed-in Faema, a Krug. Theirs was not a kitchen optimized for production but a parliament in which objects are permitted to specialize, overlap, and even contradict one another. Where I see duplication, they see choice.
This is not to say that the matter is simply subjective. You cannot have it all. Those who try, offend against the natural order. The prohibition against having it all is not moral, it is structural. Every finite system operates under constraints. Optimization along one axis inevitably degrades performance along another. Specialization can only arise by displacing alternatives. A kitchen that attempts to host every excellence becomes illegible, incoherent and dysfunctional; it becomes a showroom. The relative in whose kitchen every food preparation method can be found is also similarly equipped and stocked across all domains of life. To relieve the resulting congestion, the family has decided to create a museum (showroom) devoted to (showcasing) his accumulation journey; converting dysfunction into exhibition.
"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her" (John 8:7)
I am not immune. I have both a plumbed-in ECM Synchronika and a Nespresso Creatista Pro. I regret this transgression and I will not make excuses. Though if you are ever in my kitchen please note that the ECM requires a commitment to the craft of espresso that none in my household who drink coffee are willing to make.
And so I remain a visitor to toasters riding in on my high horse. I use them elsewhere, attentively and without regret. I enjoy the refinement at the expense of other people falling into disgrace. In a world increasingly crowded with high crimes and egregious offenses, this seems a defensible indulgence.
Maxim 619 : Pleasures are best borrowed.
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