The first thing that struck me about the mass-market microwave that connects to the internet is how peculiar the machine's diet is.
The GE Smart Countertop Microwave with Scan-to-Cook Technology is, despite the mouthful of a name, fairly unassuming to look at. It's nearly identical to the slightly tinier, hardworking GE JES1072SHSS that I own. Yet this new, .9 cubic-foot, 900-watt microwave comes packed with high-tech features: You can use an app to scan the bar code on the back of your Hot Pockets to set the cooking time on the microwave. If you've got an Amazon Dot, Echo, or Show, you can do important things like turn it on and off or thaw chicken with your voice.
It’s not just Hot Pockets. A GE rep forwarded an impossibly long list of 7,496 barcodes that it could scan—Healthy Choice Simply Steamers Beef Chimichurri, Guinness Irish Nachos, Jimmy Dean Pancakes & Sausage On A Stick, Totino's Pizza Sticks, DiGiorno Pizza Buns, DiGiorno Pizza & Wyngz. Oddly, frozen vegetables hadn't been prioritized for the first round of scan-ables. I could search the spreadsheet for “pizza” and the word would came up 426 times in the food name column alone. But fresh veggies? Not yet an option.
By chance, at the time I had the microwave in my test kitchen, I was reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Wind, Sand and Stars and came across a passage about the role of machines in our lives.
"The machine is not an end. An airplane is not an end: it is a tool," he writes. Tools are created to allow you to reach greater goals, and machines should not distract from this pursuit. In fact, you should barely notice that they're there. With this in mind, I was getting an early sense that the connected aspect of the machine I was reviewing felt like a work in progress.
While there's a fair amount of technology being hefted around here, I'm not sure GE's new offering does much to advance mankind. In fact, it may signal a regression.
Saint-Exupéry's words rang in my ears as I drove to the grocery store in search of a microwaveable lunch.
"Oh yeah, people will definitely buy that microwave," said the stock clerk at my local Safeway. "If you can just scan it, people won't even need to read. They'll like that."
The two of us stood in the center of the frozen food section where I tried to cross reference the selection on hand with a pared-down version of GE’s 7,000-plus item list. Those high-trafficked grocery aisles are their own circle of hell on a good day, but when I tried to find a few specific things on a spreadsheet, it seemed as if all their boxes had been mixed together in a hopper then shelved with a confetti cannon.
Eventually, I found a few things: Stouffer's Meat Lovers Lasagna, Marie Callender's Turkey Pot Pie, Cherry Port Pork from EatingWell, and Premium Pepperoni & Sausage Pizza Hot Pockets.
I left the frozen prepared food aisle then passed the frozen vegetables because GE hasn't yet got to those in earnest. It also skipped fresh veggies, which is a bummer because cooking those is one of the easiest things you can do in a microwave. One might argue that fresh veggies don't have bar codes, but it couldn't be that difficult to include a laminated page with them in the instruction manual which you could tape to the side of the appliance. Then again, maybe GE just wanted to knock off one very popular category in one go before the product launch deadline.