Here’s a kitchen tool for you, Mrs. Robinson

In one of the more memorable scenes from the movie The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock, the Dustin Hoffman character, gets some unwanted career advice from a friend of his parents. "I just want to say one word to you,” says Mr. Maguire, his arm firmly around Benjamin, “Plastics.”

That now famous film line, uttered for the first time back in 1967, reverberated with audiences who understood that “plastics” symbolized everything that was wrong with America’s suburban middle-class values and aspirations – the materialism, the phoniness, the conformity, the budding obsession with consuming for consumption’s sake. I was only two when The Graduate was released but I can appreciate the irony of that line given how little the middle-class quest to conform and consume seems to have changed over the years – especially in the kitchen.

Plastics came to mind as I sat through my first “pampered chef” party the other night. The Pampered Chef is the somewhat evangelical offspring of that iconic revolutionary, Tupperware. Founded by suburban American homemaker and entrepreneur Doris Christopher, the Pampered Chef empire uses an army of homemakers to sell hundreds of kitchen tools made of, you guessed it, plastic -- not to mention many other groovy materials Mr. Maguire couldn’t have even imagined back in the swingin’ 60s.

These products, claims Cunningham, make cooking easier and faster. Her mantra is: time wasted fixing meals is time that could be better spent with your husband and kids and, apparently, this can’t be achieved without the help of a dizzying array of cookware, cutlery and other culinary devices like the Mix ‘N Masher, Apple Wedger, Pie Gate and Hold & Slice – the last one bearing a disturbing resemblance to an afro pick.

My sister and I were the only single women at the party held deep in northwestern suburbs of city. Almost all the other guests were stay-at-home moms – some well-educated, some older, all nice, friendly women. It was a Friday night and not a cocktail in sight. The Pampered Chef is all about good, clean cooking. Mrs. Robinson, the original desperate housewife, would have hated this, I thought, like she would have loathed the Tupperware parties of her time. She would have opted for a cigarette over a spoon any day. And I imagine she was partial to more risqué gadgets -- the kind usually found in bedside drawers, not kitchens.

The soft sales pitch began when the hostess asked each guest to choose a piece of kitchen equipment to try out. The plan was for the guests to prepare an aloha chicken pizza and cherry chocolate skillet cake together at the kitchen table. My job was to chop a red pepper. Right away, I saw that my gadget, a maraca-shaped food chopper that I quickly dubbed the Bang & Chop, was a complete waste of good plastic.

As the party hostess demo'd it for me, she said, “You just need to push down on it harder. Just bang it down a few times to get everything chopped up nicely.” She’d already employed a mini-scoop to de-seed the pepper, a knife to cut it into pieces small enough for the Bang & Chop to accommodate, and some weird flattened scoops to transfer the pepper pieces to a nearby bowl.

“Don’t you see?” I wanted to yell at the other guests. “With one good sharp knife, we could have had this diced in half the time it’s taken us to produce this sloppy mess of red shards.”

“And the best thing about this,” added the hostess, while breaking the B&C down into its fussy individual metal and plastic parts. “Is that it can be dismantled and put in the dishwasher.” So, in addition to the trauma of maiming a perfectly innocent red pepper, my environmental antenna sprung to life!

As the evening progressed through displays of collapsible mixing bowls, metal egg separators and garlic presses – all dishwasher-safe! -- the presenter enthusiastically pointed out that many of the tools are designed so you never have to touch the food you’re preparing. Since I’ve never understood people’s aversion to touching food they are perfectly happy to put in their mouths, the whole thing struck me as slightly repressed.

Of course, the target consumer for these devices are moms with tots. Being single and childless, I don’t know what it’s like to fix dinner with a snotty, crying child hanging off my leg. But I don’t buy the sales pitch that the solution to getting food on the table quickly is to arm yourself with lots of kitchen gadgets. Wouldn’t be easier and better for the environment – not to mention the soul – to stay focused on the food, not the tools?

My grandmother, now 94 and the original comfort food queen, will tell you the simplest, most satisfying dishes are prepared with a few good ingredients and even less equipment. Her signature dish of macaroni and cheese requires only seven ingredients (and that includes the salt and pepper) and five kitchen tools. She still makes it for her family and it beats aloha chicken pizza any day.

Back at the Pampered Chef party, the pizza and cake were ready to eat and everyone had moved to the living room to fill out their order forms. As I eavesdropped on discussions about high-tech spatulas and whisks, I thought not much has changed since ’67. There will always be stay-at-home moms in suburban kitchens spending their husbands’ pay cheques on the latest in needless cookware. These people will always be more interested in “stuff” than in the actual food they are preparing.

But, luckily, there will always be people like me, too. We are disillusioned, alienated gastronomic Benjamin Braddocks. We aren’t interested in being pampered. And while we may never triumph over the $700M Pampered Chef empire and its ilk, we will always want our food to be real, the preparation authentic. We’ll always want more flavour, basic, good-quality tools, fewer gadgets, less plastic.