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?
well, I guess all the disturbing things it says… are also in a very weird conversation with other truth-in-advertising rulings.
I am very much not an expert on this, but I remember one starkly different case from the news, years ago
the product Splenda – aka sucralose, a zero-calorie sweetener that (from the vague descriptions that were going around) seems to be made by replacing some of the atoms in sugar molecules with chlorine– got hit with a lawsuit.
not a lawsuit about any actual harm; AFAIK the product hadn’t been shown to be dangerous at all (though some of the quotes in the news did bring up “it contains chlorine!!” as if that was inherently proof of danger in a way somehow more scary than how normal table salt contains chlorine as a part of its molecules)
the lawsuit was strictly about truth in advertising
The commercials had been using the slogan: “Made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar.” which was… very obviously true
however, some people argued that it was misleading because it …falsely implied the product was “natural.”
now, the very idea of trying to define “natural” is a thing that I’m surprised was ever even allowed to cross the threshold of a courtroom. But the case was admitted.
and it did NOT go the only way I personally can imagine it going, which would have been:
…
“I bought this because the ads made me think it was natural, but it isn’t.”
“what does natural mean to you?”
“well, it doesn’t mean the high-tech chemical procedure that I found out they do in a lab to make this stuff.”
“so, you would not have bought it if you’d known it was made using a complex high-tech procedure in a lab.”
“no! I was led to think it was natural, like sugar.”
“why did you not buy sugar instead then?”
“because sugar is high in calories! …that’s, like, sugar’s whole thing! I did not want that! I wanted a zero-calorie sweetener.”
“so. you are aware that sugar’s nutritional value consists of practically nothing but calories.…”
“what’s your point?”
“…and you saw a product that claimed to be both zero-calorie, and made from sugar… and you… somehow concluded that, based on these statements…. it must not have been made using an exceedingly complex process in a lab???”
…
That was apparently not how the court case went.
I don’t know exactly how it went, but the news article said that Splenda lost the case and was no longer allowed to mention the fact that it was made from sugar.
meanwhile…. i guess the lawsuits about microwaves marketing a burn-down-your-house button as a popcorn button just got thrown out.
lovely world we live in.