Can my spoon taste my food for me?

It's been another long day at work, and the last thing you
want to do is go home and cook for your family. No matter how
hard you try, the peanut gallery will find some reason to
complain. "The soup is too salty," says one child. Another
child complains that his casserole is too runny. "This pie
crust could really use some citrus," reports your spouse, who
apparently moonlights as a food critic for the local
newspaper.

What you need is an intelligent spoon, a mixing spoon that
uses sensors to measure different food qualities, like
acidity, during the cooking process. This automated kitchen
utensil was developed by two students at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2005. The students were
working in MIT's Counter Intelligence Lab, which tries to
create smart technology products that make our time in the
kitchen easier. Smart technology automates appliances and
devices with computers so that most of the work and the
required thought are eliminated from everyday tasks.

Some of the Counter Intelligence Lab's other cool innovations
for kitchens of the future include the "Talking Trivet,"
which will let you know if something needs to be rewarmed, if
it's too hot to touch or if it's ready to eat. Faucets will
let you know both the temperature of the water and also if
you're using too much of it. In the future, you could project
recipes directly onto a countertop so the cookbook doesn't
get dirty, and you could save electricity by never having to
open your fridge just to know what's inside. Instead, a small
camera and projection screen could let you know your fridge's
contents when you're thinking about what's for dinner.

But what about those intelligent spoons? How can they help
with dinner? How do they use smart technology to taste food?

Intelligent Spoon

Currently, the prototype intelligent spoon is made of clear
plastic so that you can see an array of wires running through
the inside. The smart spoon contains zinc, aluminum and gold
sensors. When the spoon touches food, the sensors measure the
concoction's temperature, acidity, salinity and viscosity.
When you connect the spoon to a computer with a cord, the
computer analyzes the information from the spoon and provides
feedback. Although the intelligent spoon is still in
development, we guess that it measures these factors and
creates suggestions based on a database of recipes stored in
the computer.

How might this play out in the kitchen? Say you're making
salad dressing from scratch. You find a recipe on the
computer and start following it. You accidentally add too
much salt, and you're worried the entire dressing is too
salty. Rather than tasting the dressing, figuring out how to
adjust it and tasting it again, the computer would tell you
to add a certain amount of sugar. The computer would tell you
how much vinegar or lime juice to add so that you had just
the right amount of acidity, as measured by the mix's pH
level. Is the dressing not holding together? The viscosity
sensor will alert the computer that you need more egg yolk.
It would be like having a GPS system for each recipe -- a
step-by-step instruction based on what's in the bowl.

Now, if you love to cook, this might seem a bit silly. Some
cooks would argue that your intuition and personal preference
are better guides for preparing food than any precise recipe.
It's the joy of tasting and tinkering that creates magic in
the kitchen, and mistakes are part of the process. You just
may stumble onto something better than what's in the
cookbook. Cooks may even point out that you can't always
follow a recipe word for word. For example, baking at higher
altitudes is much different than baking at sea level because
altitude affects moisture content. It's too early to tell
whether the intelligent spoon will provide this level of
assistance.

While cooking may become intuitive, the intelligent spoon
could really help new cooks or clumsy cooks get on the right
foot in the kitchen. They may eventually learn from their
intelligent spoon and feel more comfortable cooking on their
own. However, the intelligent spoon is not for sale yet, and
there are several unknowns, including cost and ease of use.
Smart appliances in general are not widely available in the
marketplace, in part because they're usually more expensive
than traditional appliances and because they can be more
complicated to use. Many people may not trust a smart
appliance when the regular one works just fine. In the case
of the smart spoon, not everyone will want to drag a laptop
into the kitchen for cooking advice.

Still, we may see the smart spoon in stores one day -- there
are already some sensor spoons for sale. These spoons, meant
to be used in the microwave, change color as the meal heats.
When you see that your spoon is a certain color, you'll know
it's time to eat. One variation is specifically for babies,
so that a caregiver will know if food is too hot for a baby's
gums.