/lit/ - Literature

Microwaves are literally worse than ten atom bombs.

And I'm not talking about radiation.

It opens the doors for food that is more processed, with much more salt, with more room for dishonesty about its content, it makes us expend a whole lot more energy with freezers, it produces an obscene ammount of plastic, it corrupts family recipes and bonding over cooking, renders farming obsolete to anyone but corporations, it excuses worker right's violations because it shortens the perceived ammount of time it takes to cook a meal and spend your "free time". It's impossible to account the ammount of turtles that died stuck in frozen lasagna plastic bags, or how much time depressed young adults have lost looking at their walls while being comforted by the possibility of simply heating up something in the microwave to survive, how many heart attacks it has directly or indirectly caused and how much energy and money some people spent on fitness and health to escape the increased risk of health problems. At most we blame the food companies and watch them subtly reform themselves to profit over misery in some slightly more disguised way, but no one even mentions the microwave.

That is because we all love our microwaves. They are handy, we see how it saves our time and our own personal effort to cook a meal so that we can focus on something else which we deem more important, not often realizing that is an incredible advertising opportunity to have this void and be told what should be important to us. It spare us all, individually, of a burden in relation to our own sustainance right there and then, we let it and the food companies to take care of that. However, collectively, it burdens us all with a much bigger weight, that, because it weights on us all equally, will stress the weak portions of our society to a much worse degree than the rest.

The microwave is representative of a lot of things that makes our lives easier, in a sense more productive, that it is relatively cheap and accessible, integral part of everyday life to most of us, completely out of the range of any criticism because its effects are so indirect and untangible, that no one would blame it for anything, no one would vote against it. The microwave is one, of many other things that are just as irrelevant, that indirectly and subtly ruins the world by giving us what is, in the moment, the best of all possible worlds, the fast and effortless nutrition that we expect from the food we eat and from the ideas we cultivate.