Clara Bullock
With Instagram and other social media on the rise, even such basic things as kitchen items have become prettier and trendy. Since everyone is looking at our cooking utensils on social media, we want to impress people with our designer cutlery drain, designer cheese grater, and even designer bin. Down to the most mundane kitchen items, everything we purchase should be nice to look at and should go well with our next food post on Instagram. While this might seem slightly ridiculous, it has one advantage: pretty kitchen items have become more affordable than they were before, meaning everyone can go crazy and style their kitchen down to the detail.
Of course, stylish kitchen items are not a new invention. It has always been important to have nice cutlery, nice serving dishes, maybe nice salt and pepper shakers. That’s because those were the items guests would see and hopefully be impressed by. But guests usually stayed out of the kitchen preparations and so having an intricately designed chopping board would be a waste. However, now that we are letting everyone see our food prepping on social media channels, and boast about the complicated dishes we make to our friends, and colleagues, and friends of friends, and friends of our colleagues, that chopping board suddenly becomes an important part of our aesthetically pleasing posts. We need kitchen items to show how stylish we are, how much we care about cooking.
Thankfully, kitchen brands have caught on to this phenomenon and started selling basic kitchen items in jazzed-up versions. While we might already be used to electrical kitchen items like toasters and kettles to be made slightly more exciting by adding some color, these new basic items are meant to be downright artisanal. They come in wood, warm metals, decorated in subtle pastel colors, matching an entire fashion world that has gone pastel-crazy. From spatulas to water filters, everything looks cute, pretty and fashionable at once.
All of this might sound like a typical consumerist craze, the anxiety of not being as cool as our role models on social media. But having pretty kitchen items can actually improve our attitude towards food: it motivates us to cook more instead of getting take-out and it highlights the artistic and creative side of cooking. In a self-care obsessed society, eating health home-cooked meals is becoming a priority. Self-care isn’t just about the healthy food, it’s also about the joy of cooking. With the right items, that joy can be sparked more easily: instead of focusing on the functionality of cooking, pretty kitchenware focuses more on the fun side of spending time in the kitchen.
Treating yourself to an aesthetic set of wooden spoons or golden trash can is now in reach for everyone. With more affordable prices and a wide range of choices, there shouldn’t be much in the way between you and your perfectly designed Instagram post.