Mac On Tap Is Just The Beginning
Published on Jun 28, 2020
You’ve got nothing better going on in your life right now, so I’m sure you’re already fully aware of the new vaporware contraption the food wizards at Stouffer’s are touting. Which, frankly, about goddamn time. Why should ice cream, soda, and nacho cheese be the only foods readily dispensible from a tap?
Come to think of it, why is my entire kitchen not one glistening metal teet after another? Why do I own any kind of flatware? Why is my dinner table a table at all and not a massive trough with a drain in the middle that just leads directly back to another ‘left-overs’ food dispenser for me to enjoy at a later date? It is time to face facts, meal pills aren’t happening. Science fiction lied to us. What recourse do we have other than to embrace this new mass-produced, lukewarm, on-demand dispenser future?
Mac and cheese is a great start, and probably an obvious evolution of the aforementioned nacho cheese dispenser. In fact, all Stouffer’s really did (presumably, assuming this thing actually exists in anything other than a Photoshop file) was find a way to add elbow macaroni to the bag. This is not groundbreaking stuff. In fact, I’m sure they’ve been sitting on this for years, just waiting for the perfect time to release it. I’ll bet the fat cats at Stouffer’s could barely contain themselves when they realized this pandemic thing meant people were going to be trapped in their homes with nothing to do but binge Netflix and stress eat. (I’m not saying Stouffer’s - and by proxy those water-hoarding villains at Nestlé - started this whole thing, but I AM saying it’s something to look into. You know, once we’ve cleared 5G of any wrongdoing.) However, we need to be dreaming bigger. This is America, goddamnit. Where the phrase ‘All You Can Eat’ is less of a marketing tactic and more of an outright challenge.
We can do better. We must do better.
Right off the bat, I’m thinking hotdogs. We’ve already been lazily cooking those on rollers inside gas stations for years - through a mysterious process I still do not fully comprehend, nor do I care to. Yet, I still have to reach out with my own hands, grab a pair of tongs, select one, and place it in a bun. Then and only then, am I finally able to eat the damned thing.
That’s like 4 steps too many. I’m winded just thinking about it.
Hell, we’ve got the airguns at the sporting events that shoot hotdogs into the stands. Why have we not combined the rollers and the guns to make an at-home hotdog cannon that can deliver these delicious tubes of miscellaneous scrap meat directly into my mouth at a rate of…say, 50 dogs per minute? This seems like a no-brainer.
After that, the sky’s the limit. Obviously, plenty of foods are ready to make the jump to an all-dispenser output right now. Soups, dips, mashed potatoes, green-bean casserole - the list goes on and on. Without a doubt, some foods will require a period of trial and error. How exactly are we going to make a mozzarella cheese stick dispenser that doesn’t undercook those little bastards leaving you with nothing but a half-melted block of breadcrumb-encrusted sadness? Smarter men and women than me will have to figure that out. But I believe in the ingenuity of our great scientific minds. Plus, it isn’t like they have anything better to do right now.