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Are you such a multitasker that the single-minded job of driving has gotten boring? Don't worry, now there are DVD movie-players for the front seat of your car!
Are you so alienated from nature that you can't tell when a piece of fruit is ripe? Never fear. A new line of packaging tells you when it's ready to eat.
Are you too impatient for your morning coffee to wait eight minutes while your automatic drip machine brews a fresh pot? Voila--coffee that makes itself.
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Impressive? I suppose so. But increasingly, it seems to me, we Americans are so agog over the latest technological gadgetry that we overlook a simple fact: we usually don't need it. Take self-heating coffee from a Delaware company named OnTech. Flip the can on its head, press a button on the bottom, then shake for 10 seconds. Turn it back over and let it sit for eight minutes. A mixture of specially treated water interacting with calcium oxide makes a piping hot cup of morning joe. Sounds yummy, but wait. Eight minutes plus 10 seconds? Your old pal, Mr. Coffee, can brew an entire pot in half the time!
OnTech plans to introduce a whole line of such drinks, beginning with a latte created by Wolfgang Puck, who used to be an important chef but whose rep nowadays resides chiefly in your supermarket's freezer section. With OnTech, he will certainly go where no chef has gone before. Given that most Americans have fairly easy access to a freshly brewed, foamy, delicious latte for roughly the same price as Puck's canned mixture of coffee, milk, artificial sweetener, pectin and acesulfame potassium, the most logical place for OnTech's innovation is aboard the space shuttle. Yet CEO Jonathan Weisz is confident. "There's a huge need for this product," he says. "Everyone has such an on-the-go lifestyle." What next? Think self-heating soups, hot chocolate and teas--not to mention oatmeal and chili.
Is OnTech aware that Campbell's, the intergalactic soup giant, is working with Ford to put small microwave ovens in cars? (The only downside to this invention is that America may not have enough personal-injury lawyers to handle the future lawsuits.) And why stop with ovens when you can turn cars into home theaters on wheels? Makers of automotive DVDs say that a high percentage of sales now come from people who want to watch movies in the front seat. So what if 39 states have laws forbidding just that? Manufacturers protect themselves by requiring drivers to press a button affirming that he/she will not actually watch the screen while the car is in motion--what Mary Poppins used to call a "pie-crust promise," easily made and easily broken.
You don't have to be a Luddite to believe that the self-heating can or in-car theater are examples of our obsession with throwing technology at something that's not even a problem. "This is America today," says David Gregg, senior editor at Best magazine and a technology hunter for "The Early Show" on CBS. "Everything has to be faster and faster. We're not making new products. We're just reinventing things to give us instant gratification."
The list goes on. Among my favorites is ripeSense, "the world's first intelligent sensor label," as its manufacturer bills it. Ripening fruit gives off aromas that can be detected by a sensor affixed to the packaging, going from red to orange and finally yellow. "By matching the color of the sensor with your eating preferences," the company explains, "you can now accurately choose fruit as ripe as you like it."
Waiting for fruit to ripen? Isn't there some machine that could do it faster?
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