what does it say about us as a culture that most of our microwaves have a dedicated popcorn button
i dont know but whatever it says, its magnified by literally every bag of popcorn saying “don’t use the popcorn button”
Funnily enough, there’s an answer for that.
In brief, the “popcorn” button was initially introduced by fancy high-end microwaves that used an integrated humidity sensor to tell when your popcorn was done; microwaveable popcorn vents steam as it cooks, so by monitoring the amount of steam in the cooking chamber, you can get pretty close to perfectly popped popcorn every time (though it’s generally only pretty close, since different brands of microwaveable popcorn have different moisture content).
As the feature became popular, manufacturers of cheap microwaves started adding a button labelled “popcorn” as well, in order to imply that they offer this feature. These “popcorn” buttons simply run the microwave for a fixed amount of time that the manufacturer figures is close enough to the printed cooking time of most commercial brands.
In practice, of course, the fixed-time “popcorn” button usually just sets your popcorn on fire. To make matters worse, owing to America’s permissive advertising laws, microwave manufacturers are allowed to make all sorts of misleading-but-technically-true statements in their packaging and instruction manuals, rendering it nearly impossible to tell whether a given model of microwave has a real humidity-sensing “popcorn” button or a fake fixed-time “popcorn” button before buying it.
In summary: the “popcorn” button that your microwave popcorn instructs you not to use exists because American microwave manufacturers are using a misleadingly labelled button in order to imply that their product has a feature that it does not in fact have, in a way that can potentially trick people into burning their houses down, for advertising purposes. This is perfectly legal.
So: what does that say about our culture?
Information that helps give context to our college roommate blowing up the dorm microwave twice via the popcorn button.
popcorn always spurs on my creativity these days
so now i am happily imagining Roy Kleinberg trying to figure out if his microwave has the high tech sensor and he decides to mcgyver-connect it to a disk drive and send Ram in there
ram comes out saying “well there’s a guy in there CALLING himself the MCP (Master Controller of Popcorn) but he would NOT tell me if he was in there making calls based on humidity or just based on time, and he threatened to sic an army on me if i tried to find out, so I derezzed him”
and roy is like… ok fair enough, we did not need that button anyway