Intro
My beloved WonderWash is one such example of a “missing middle” appliance. When I say “missing middle,” I refer to the appliances that lie in between historic manual tools (washboard) and 21st century electrical appliances (big ass brutal washing machine).
Today, we will be discussing blenders! Chopping, mixing, beating, and fluffing, blenders have done humankind justice indeed, likely saving our entire species billions of hours in the kitchen whipping up foam or mashing fruit. They come in many variations: the typical blender for smoothies and soup, beaters for whipping cream or egg, food processors/choppers for mincing, grinders for spices and coffee, etc. I will henceforth just be referring to this category of appliances as blenders – an appliance involving a rotating blade used to make the input smaller than it was before or to incorporate two or more things together.
The historic manual tool for the blender is, of course, the mortar and pestle. Coming in all variations of size from the size of your palm to bigger than your head, you can use them for spice grinding or mashing coconut meat! Besides the mortar and pestle, there is also the good ol’ wooden spoon + some elbow grease for whipping cream.
Now in the present day, few of us could be bothered to mash up a smoothie in a mortar and pestle or spend hours whipping cream by hand. We’ve been blessed by technological innovation haven’t we? In just a few minutes, your electric blender will have a perfectly smooth smoothie and your electric beater will have produced stiff-peaked whipped cream.
Now this all seems well and good on the surface. The thing is that electrical appliances are 1) much more expensive than their manual counterparts, 2) not BIFL (buy-it-for-life), and 3) not sustainable.
Electrical appliances are not based in SEFF values
Expensive
The first point is pretty self-explanatory. Hot summer days and you, my fellow SEFF, are longing for an ice cold smooth-af smoothie. But the price tags on new blenders that will get you that smoothness are looking a bit alarming. And the thrift store blenders leave you with chunky fruit and ice pebbles. Smooth-ass smoothie dreams = over. The price tag of well-functioning, quality electrical appliances is simply too high for us penny-pinchers who are wanting to engage with capitalism as little as possible. And the price of these modern innovations are also not very accessible to those in non-industrialized countries.
Not BIFL
Second, not BIFL. Electrical appliances simply will not last a lifetime like a manual appliance would. For an appliance to be BIFL, they either need to be super sturdy or super repairable.
Not sturdy
Electrical appliances, especially something with viciously moving internal parts like a blender, are difficult to make sturdy. I mean, the possibility exists – electric blenders could be made sturdy, with fully metal parts and no plastic, but under capitalism, I don’t think that will ever happen.
You might say “well, sofu! I’ve had my KitchenAid blender for years! It’s still working great!” and that might indeed be the case, and to that I say, fabulous. But the reality is that any appliance with plastic involved in its moving parts or parts in general, is not going to last generations and most blenders are made with plastic drive heads and drive sockets.
My immersion blender woes
I will recount my own experience here that was a major reason for writing this. I spent a pretty penny a couple years ago on the Mueller Austria immersion blender.
Five star reviews on Amazon, I believe I managed to snag it “used – Like New” on there. I used it for frozen fruit smoothies and soup mostly. I used the heck out of it. Truly… I’d never had an immersion blender before that, and boy, was it a joy to just rinse off the blend head and not have to wash around blades and all the crevices of a typical blender. It also came with two other blend heads! A micro whisk for foaming aesthetic matcha lattes and a normal whisk for whipping cream and such. Joy! No need for an electric beater.
But, a few months after purchasing, the micro whisk would no longer spin when attached. It wouldn’t attach onto the body of the blender properly and the issue seemed to be that the drive head on the micro whisk had worn down and thus no longer aligned. This was not too bad because I mainly used the bladed blend head for my precious smooth-ass smoothies.
Then, about 9 months later, the plastic drive head on the bladed blend head broke too. I was emo. Seriously. I used that thing so much.
Anyways, I was also pissed because the drive head is literally this little plastic thing the size of your thumb nail but the entire operation of the blender counts on it! For a bit more context on how this immersion blender works: essentially, the blade is attached to a metal shaft. The metal shaft must slot into the motor so that it can spin. Instead of making the metal shaft have a metal drive head at the top of it to slot into the drive socket of the motor, they decided to attach a flimsy little piece of round black plastic at the top of the metal shaft. This little plastic piece takes on all of the force of the motor and all of the wear and tear coming from the blade being detached and reattached for cleaning (if it wasn’t clear yet, I just realized I forgot to mention that this is a immersion blender with detachable blend heads, hence the ability to use multiple blend heads on one motor body).
So, now that this little plastic piece was broken – the blender was useless! Even though the motor and three blend heads were all in splendid condition, there was no way of attaching them to each other.
I contacted Mueller to see if they could ship me a replacement part for this stupid little thing but they sent me the wrong part initially (despite several photos of wtf I was talking about. ugh, this is another 21st century appliance issue: customer service that is totally detached from the engineering department) and then told me the part I actually needed is not available. AGHHH. Can you imagine my frustration that my luxurious smooth-ass smoothies had come to an end just because of the manufacturer’s decision to have this stupid plastic drive head in an otherwise quality-built product? Seriously, who thought this would be a good idea? Is this the planned obsolescence aspect of this product? Or are they actually just that stupid? …It’s probably planned obsolescence.
My only path forward at this point was to figure out how to fashion this little drive head attachment out of metal somewhere. But I am not a metal worker and I’m not sure when I will ever have the resources to be one. Thus, my drive headless immersion blender remains pensively in my cabinet.
Now, after this tragic tale, I embarked on a search for an immersion blender that used a metal drive head. And really, all metal construction was my preference. (Gawd, aren’t y’all sick of the entrenchment of fossil fuels in our daily lives too?) And wouldn’t you know it, they don’t really fucking exist! I think they might exist in commercial immersion blenders but those things are massive (literally. look them up. makes it look like I’m about to fucking decimate my smoothie) and much more than a single pretty penny. This Redditor had the same plastic driver struggles as me and ultimately purchased a Bamix immersion blender which does indeed look promising as it looks to be metal attaching to metal, but it also will cost you at least $200. Skull emoji.
Anyways, thank you for listening to that story. I know it was specific to my immersion blender woes but I think electrical appliances in general won’t last a lifetime simply because they are electric. Wiring will burn out and viciously moving parts will wear out. Combine that with the fact that most of them are cheaply made in the first place and I feel pretty confident saying that 99.9% of consumer facing electric appliances will not last you a lifetime. Whether that be a washing machine, a TV, a light bulb, a microwave, or… an immersion blender.
Not repairable
Now for the second part of why electrical appliances are not BIFL – they are not repairable. Electrical appliances are complex and essentially impossible for the average consumer to take apart, buy parts for, and repair.
Taking apart: they are often assembled with glue. Most electrical appliances, you just look at it and you know that they never built it to be taken apart by a consumer. There may not be any visible screws at all and there definitely is not a disassemble and reassemble manual publicly available.
Buy parts for: Golly… A lot of the components of electrical appliances are proprietary and these companies almost never have replacement parts for purchase. They’re a specific shape of plastic or metal or glass that is impossible for you to find online and impossible to recreate at home. You can dive deep into the net and potentially figure out the part # and then lurk on Ebay for a bit till someone else by miracle lists a broken version of your appliance that you can disassemble and scavenge for parts from but, seriously, repairing the appliance is a whole-ass hobby at that point then. And all you ever wanted was just a smooth-ass smoothieeee. ;,(
So yeah, we can all agree that they are not BIFL right? Which leads me to my third point: Sustainability.
Not sustainable
Electrical appliances are not sustainable. They are not long-lasting, they require electricity which currently still mostly comes from fossil fuels (in the US, at least), they are extremely difficult (and in many places in the US, impossible) to fully recycle (and I mean FULLY! 100% nothing-left-behind recycling), and they use batteries which require rare earth metals that are mined out of the ground with questionable-at-best, deplorable-at-worst environmental effects and working conditions.
But I still need my smoothies!!! Aur!!!!! But the only other option is really to mash up some frozen fruit in a big ass mortar and pestle and that’s not really feasible in terms of time for me… (I was almost driven to do this though).
“Missing middle” appliances
This brings me to my main point about “missing middle” appliances. It occurred to me while I was taking a dump this morning, to endeavor on a Google search of “manual non-electric blenders” and VOILA! By miracle of god, or rather, silly innovation, there exists an appliance called the BevRev. Based on their website and Internet presence, the BevRev seems to be marketed towards health-focused upper middle class gym & hiking people and not really very popular with said health-focused upper middle class gym hiking people. They have two reviews on Amazon and their last social media post was in 2022. But, the product itself is unlike anything else on the market! It’s literally just a typical looking personal blender but instead of plugging it in and pressing a button, you blend by cranking the bottom of it or rolling it across the table! The miracle of human innovation! Do you see what I mean by “missing middle” appliances now? This product is not at all electric, but it is far more efficient at blending than pounding away with a mortar and pestle (it can even do frozen fruit! by god! frozen fruit! manually! in minutes! smooth-ass smoothie salvation!!!!). It just has some gears at the bottom. Good ol’ gears. Why hasn’t anyone else thought of this? Gears have been the amplifier of the human ability for centuries!
Alas. This lack of true innovation I think comes down to the fact that the human race in industrialized parts of the globe is now too caught up in the brute force of electricity to consider amplified manual power. Of course, capitalism also plays a stagefront role in cheap ass disposable products and manufacturing processes that shit on our planet but I think for this specific issue of “missing middle” appliances, it comes down to reliance on electricity.
We (those used to the gluttonous luxury of industrialized countries) will all be fucked once the climate crisis energy shortages start hitting us. No more unending insatiable use of energy for smooth-ass smoothies and stiff-peaked whipped cream. Well,…. maybe not for you. I will be doing a long and hard contemplation of the BevRev and whether or not to add it to my tool box. Do you think I could find it secondhand? It is super niche. But, I’m really good at lurking for stuff on the Internet. Hmmm…. 🙂
Below, you may peruse an ongoing list I have identified of “missing middle” appliances that are in existence and “missing middle” appliances that really ought to be in existence. (Seriously, if I wasn’t hell bent on ruling the world via activism, I’d definitely be making cool shit like an eyedropper fountain pen constructed fully out of recycled titanium with an extra fine nib. Sigh.)
This is a #wip list.
“Missing Middle” appliances in existence
- The Laundry Alternative’s WonderWash – manual washing machine (<3333 joyyy)
- BevRev – manual personal blender
- old fashioned manual “egg beaters” – basically a hand crank spinny whisk 🙂
- hand crank spice grinders
- laundry lines on a pulley system that descend from the ceiling of your balcony (common in China) – easily line-dry clothes up above you, leaving the balcony space still free to use
- Manual spice grinders
- Solar ovens
“Missing Middle” appliances not in existence
- WonderWash, but of fully stainless steel construction
- BevRev, but of fully stainless steel construction and with different interchangeable blend heads
- eyedropper fountain pen made fully out of recycled titanium. Metal eyedropper pens don’t really exist because metal reacts with ink. Except, titanium wouldn’t.
- The Laundry Alternative’s Ninja – centrifugal spin dryer, but non-electric. Maybe bicycle powered? Or just hand crank? Idk, with human innovation, surely amplified manual power can be used 😀
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