The kitchen was always a favorite of those newsreel demonstrations. How is today's kitchen like the one envisioned in the fifties? Well, some of the futuristic time-saving devices that were popularized then have become commonplace in the modern household, such as the microwave oven and the automatic dishwasher (though it still uses plain old water to clean the pots, not ultrasonic waves or nuclear radiation). They've seen incremental improvements, but they never lived up to the sci-fi hype that we might have hoped for. The dining room table still doesn't clear itself, and attempts at delicious complete meals reconstituted from pills, tubes, or frozen blocks have largely ended in failure. Nevertheless, though the promise of the delicious, instant meal has only yielded "mostly OK" food, we've certainly become accustomed to packaged, processed, quick-to-prepare food, even if it isn't as good as home made.
On the other hand, there's been a kind of counter-revolution in the past decade: a revolt against processed, factory food, and a desire for healthy, organically-grown food prepared in the home from fresh ingredients and a deep distrust for the genetically-modified fruits of industrial agriculture's laboratories. Take that, George Jetson!
Refrigerators, the 20th century kitchen's first great technological marvel, today are better at what they do: keeping food at the desired, cool temperature with a minimum of fuss, and they're much more energy efficient; but other than the automatic ice maker, attempts at gussying them up with technology have been mere curiosities. You can buy a fridge today with a TV screen and internet access, and while I can think of reasons why you might want to watch TV or use the internet in the kitchen, doing it on the fridge doesn't make much sense to me.
Now, there has been talk of having a fridge that monitors the age and condition of the food inside, and that can use the bar codes (or soon, RFID tags) on packages to maintain electronic shopping lists or even reorder food automatically over the Net, but that hasn't really happened yet. And it may never happen, unless the technology that's eventually available solves a pressing-enough problem that people will be willing to pay for it.
The kitchen being the center of the household, there has been talk of making some kitchen-based technology available for tracking family calendars and events, much as notes, invitations, and fliers stuck to the fridge with magnets might in a common home today. Usually this discussion comes up in the marketing materials for a fancy overpriced refrigerator with a TV screen in it. In reality, while these kinds of calendaring and planning tools could be of value for the modern family, it's a problem much more likely to be tackled effectively in the software sphere, with the various phones, handhelds, and personal computers in the family all being able to tap into a database of family events stored on the network.
All of the software pieces exist for a connected family of that type. Many people use shared calendaring today through Outlook or other programs, and Apple's iCal paired with the .Mac service has nice shared-calendaring suitable for families that's really easy to set up, but it's tied to PCs. Some companies even have calendaring features integrated with mobile devices, but it requires expensive equipment, software, and expertise. For now, the low-tech alternative is still good enough for all but the geekiest households. If shared calendaring for families, with support for all the various devices family members might use were available, I think a lot of families would be interested. Today, however, it's just a dream, even though there are no technological hurdles at all, just platform interoperability problems.
The other major kitchen appliances, if they have changed at all, have simply become more refined. Dishwashers are more efficient and quieter, and some now have two drawers which allow you to procrastinate unloading one area while you load the other. Toasters are safer, hand mixers are lighter, and everything is cheaper, both in price and in quality, than in days past.
As far as cooking goes, very little technological advancement has been made on this front since the microwave. There are now ovens that mix microwave and conventional cooking, ovens that mix infrared and radiant heat, ones that employ fans to spread the heat out, and even ones that use steam, but it's still mostly about heating up a little box. On the stovetop, it's the same old electrical resistance coils or gas burners, and recent trends have focused mainly on ultra-expensive home stoves that look like commercial stoves.
There is one stovetop advance that's just on the cusp of wider adoption, though: the induction range. It's an electric range that uses a conductive coil called an inductor to create a pulsing magnetic field above each "burner." Even on full-blast, the cooktop would feel cool to the touch, but the magnetic field rapidly excites the electrons in magnetic metal pans, heating the pan from the inside.
Induction ranges are extremely efficient and heat more quickly and with more precision than gas or electric resistance ranges, so they have been very well-received in commercial kitchens and have been available in in Europe and Asia for several years. The first residential induction ranges are just now being introduced to North American households.
All this aside, most of the promises of the "kitchen of the future" have gone unfulfilled. Dining room tables don't clear themselves, there are no robots to do the cooking, we don't use conveyor belts to take the food to the table. It's all very boring, really.
The biggest change in the modern kitchen isn't a technological one: it's an architectural and social one. For the first seventy years of the 20th century, the kitchen was a relatively small room, separated from the rest of the house, where, seemingly, the women were expected to do their mysterious toil and emerge into the house's living quarters with prepared meals. In a way, the middle class home retained a slimmed-down version of the Victorian ideal, with the household servants replaced by the dutiful wife. But the reality of American family life had always been that the kitchen had been a kind of social center for the home, from the days when the kitchen and family hearth were one and the same. About twenty-five years ago, architecture finally started catching up with reality, and since then, kitchens have become larger, more comfortable, and located more centrally in the home's living space. The real "kitchen of the future" is one that in some cases is more like a mashup of a family room and a posh restaurant, with comfortable seating, televisions, and "homework areas" with PCs mixed with stainless steel appliances, stone countertops, halogen lighting, and multiple cookstations.
