Your Machine is Killing You
Fenja Akinde-Hummel explores how a German microwave conspiracy theory with right-wing undertones ended up in her London-Nigerian family group chat. Illustration by Sandy Christ.
Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today’s essay by Fenja Akinde-Hummel is a reflection on microwave conspiracy theories, and the sometimes-uneasy relationship with the device in her extended family.
If you haven’t picked one up already, our second print issue on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ is still available. We highly recommend buying a copy.
About a year ago, an Instagram video about microwaves was posted in my extended family group chat. It was titled ‘Benutzt du immer noch eine Mikrowelle?’, with the English caption ‘never ever again 🚫⚠️’.
‘Never again’, a phrase with very specific connotations – particularly in Germany – was here being deployed to warn people against reheating food in the microwave. In the video’s opening sequence, a woman opens a microwave (I’m guessing not her own) and removes the glass plate to show the three little ledges that keep the plate in place. The hazardous radiation symbol then pops up on screen, revealing its uncanny resemblance to the ledges. The machine, it seems, bears a warning, buried within its own functionality. If this creative engagement with symbolism (akin to the close reading of bank notes for hidden illuminati symbolism) wasn’t enough, an unidentified doctor then appears to provide the hard science: using a microwave is the ‘best way to kill yourself’, he says, claiming that ‘everything out of the microwave is highly toxic’.
In short, Your machine is killing you, says the video, its caption implying that unsuspecting microwave users are the victims of a slow genocide they don’t even know is happening.
The video’s maker is, as far as I can tell, a white German woman. In her other videos, she argues that the arrival of migrants to Germany is part of a plan to destroy the country by 2030, warns of the dangers of microplastics and suggests that feminism is a ploy to coerce women into paying taxes. How had her microwave video found its way into this chat, which is populated with UK-based uncles and aunties and cousins of various African diaspora configurations sharing, mostly, birthday greetings and embarrassing photos recovered from an old Sony Ericsson? (For context, I am a London-born Nigerian-German living in Berlin.)
Somehow, the video’s appearance wasn’t entirely unexpected. Various well-intentioned, if naive, warnings have appeared in the chat over the years – a notice about razor blades being snuck into packs of Hobnobs; cautions about 5G towers. I sent back articles and videos, seeking to gently convince my family that the microwave is not actually a killing machine. And yet, despite my broad appeals to ‘facts’ and ‘science’, I understand, and often share, this suspicious disposition. To be Black in the UK (or in Germany) is to be in an almost perpetual state of vigilance – it can be hard to know what is actually dangerous to us when it feels like anything could be.
We are familiar with the racism of state and corporate institutions, and experience a proximity to precarity, to violence, embedded within the structures that order and arrange our lives. And yet we are told that these things that we see, feel and witness do not exist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this racism also presents itself when it comes to food: Black people in the UK are more likely to live in food deserts and experience food insecurity than white people, making it harder, more expensive and certainly more time consuming for us to get what we need. When our socioeconomic system feels like a conspiracy, it’s hard to have faith in such a system, or the technology that this system produces. In this context, the microwave has become a site for the projection of anxieties around food, health and power. But how has that come to be?
*
The heating capacity of microwaves (the actual waves, that is, rather than the machine) was accidentally discovered in the USA in 1945, during World War 2. When testing the microwave-generating magnetron tube – a radar technology originally designed to detect enemy planes and ships – engineer Percy Spencer discovered that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted (given that chocolate bars tend to melt in pockets anyway, more culinary investigation followed). Spencer filed a patent, and in 1946 the first commercial microwave, the RadaRange, was sold by Raytheon (yes, that Raytheon). The RadaRange was large and expensive, designed with restaurants and large canteens in mind. It wasn’t until 1967 that the first domestic, countertop microwave was released. Microwaves started to gain popularity in the mid-seventies in the USA and then the UK, and by 2013 80% of British households had a microwave.
‘The microwave has become a site for the projection of anxieties around food, health and power. But how has that come to be?’
It is strange to consider the relationship between the guided missile and the mundane process of reheating leftovers, yet perhaps this connection goes some way to explaining the suspicion that has surrounded the microwave since its introduction to the home. The microwave was a break with traditional cooking and heating methods which had, largely, gone unchanged for centuries. It was a modern technology, a locked box with the capacity to violently burst your beans. For some, the technology was (and remains) an unwelcome interruption of these more traditional modes of cooking, but, like it or not, it has fundamentally changed how we use the kitchen.
‘I don’t believe in microwaves – if my granny ain’t use it, neither am I,’ a friend told me. By contrast, I do believe in the microwave. As much as I aspire to worshipping food and flavour so much that I don’t use one, I just cannot bring myself to cook every day. I have learned that to remain fed, I must cook for a future version of myself, freezing my food and then defrosting and reheating it when cooking feels impossible. The degradation of texture and flavour is, for me, minor, and the moralising disavowal of the microwave annoys me.
Yet when I am met with a strong anti-microwave sentiment, I can’t lie, I still feel some shame (though clearly not enough). Fundamentally, oppositions to the microwave often hinge on the rejection of convenience. One of the comments under the Instagram video reads: ‘Anyone who uses a microwave has lost control of their life 😂’, the implication being that using a microwave represents a lack of discipline (something I’m intimately acquainted with).
But what happens, practically, when you are a Nigerian in North London? When not every shop has the ingredients you like to cook with, so you trek across the city on a Saturday to get the things you need to make the food that you and your family love, food that may even last a week? This is what my grandmother would do. The stew she’d make would sit atop the stove, from where it would be dished out in Tupperware to the stream of visitors who knew it was there waiting to be carried home, reheated, enjoyed. My grandmother always cooked for many, in part so that her family didn’t all have to. Her cooking anticipated its reheating – which, for many of us, meant using a microwave. Rather than cutting us off from tradition, the microwave facilitated the connection.
In this context, the centrality of the microwave in the diaspora is an exchange of one scarcity, or abundance, for another. In the UK, because Nigerian ingredients are harder to come by, we rely on the fridge, freezer and microwave to pace access to our foods. But in Nigeria, ‘believing in’ a microwave only really makes sense if you have a stable source of electricity (for said fridge and freezer) and broadly functioning state infrastructure. For many of my relatives who live there, especially those who do not have generators, there is absolutely no point in having a microwave because, in many parts of the country, electricity comes and goes erratically – an occurrence that almost has a divine quality.
Four years ago, on an extended visit in Ibadan, the house I was staying in (which blessedly had a generator) contained a microwave that had not been touched in years. I tried using it, only to hear the generator groan an octave lower, as if physically carrying the electrical load of the machine. It was almost like I could hear the monetary cost of my poorly considered decision. To use a microwave in a context like this is to be well resourced, or to invest belief that the state infrastructure will provide you with what you need. Such a belief is not available to many of my relatives in Nigeria. Neither is it available to many of my relatives in London.
*
Among my friends and family in Nigeria, the microwave is not given much thought, because it is functionally irrelevant – a fuel-sucking, mostly useless object. But among those of us in the diaspora, its extreme convenience, coupled with the mysteries of how it works, can draw suspicion. Even though the microwave occupies the intimate space of the domestic kitchen, its functioning remains opaque. When I asked my friend why she was reluctant to use one, she responded simply: ‘What even is a microwave?’ I’m not sure if this was an actual question or a rhetorical flourish, but it communicated the continued air of mystery that surrounds the device.
‘My grandmother’s cooking anticipated its reheating – which, for many of us, meant using a microwave. Rather than cutting us off from tradition, the microwave facilitated the connection’
Microwaves have long been viewed as dangerous, with warnings about standing in front of them or near them while they’re on passed down through the generations, and their cooking process positioned as uniquely detrimental to the nutrients in food (even though over-boiling vegetables in a pot does the same thing, perhaps even more so). The relative who posted the microwave conspiracy video in the family chat expressed fear about microwaved food being ‘cooked from the inside’, which quickly became: ‘It cooks you from the inside.’
This concern – that microwaves cause some sort of nefarious, unspecified internal damage – reflects one of the long-standing anxieties about the appliance. Other modes of cooking all involve the application of heat from an obvious source to the surface of the thing being cooked. There’s a certain comfort to cooking that you can hear and see happening, that is manual and tangible: the flame is hot, the food is heated. By contrast, how microwaves produce heat remains mysterious. Waves are an invisible form of power: they can heat food, transmit information, make us sick or treat illness – almost entirely beyond our visual and physical perception. We experience the results of their effects, but we cannot see them working. As a result, it’s not obviously apparent how the food gets heated – and even the technical explanation of waves causing the vibration of particles in the food, producing friction and thus heating the food ‘from the inside out’ can seem more like a provocation than an answer. (While I do not, personally, fully understand the science, I understand it enough to comfortably eat food the microwave lovingly heats for me.)
In this regard, I can see the wave as a proxy for the often opaque structures that inform how we experience the world. In lots of ways, our material lives are arranged by architectures of power to which many will never have access, or even understand. I can easily see why the microwave, a box in which an invisible kind of power is at work, becomes a site of projection. But it is crucial that it does not remain so, as this kind of projection obscures the structures that actually endanger us.
When the video popped up on the group chat, only I responded. I guess on some level I was also defending my own relationship to reheating lentils or even coffee (gasp), while attempting to stem what I believed to be a tide of misinformation. After sending one final link, a video proving that microwaved water does not, in fact, kill plants, I concluded my defence, triumphant. No one replied.
Then another link appeared: ‘Man’s Hilarious Plane Crash Interview Goes Viral’. It seemed that everyone had moved on.
Credits
Fenja Akinde-Hummel is a keen microwave advocate, writer, and PhD candidate between KCL in London and Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. She researches Black diasporic temporalities as part of the ERC Consolidator Grant Project Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. And she loves Arsenal.
Sandy Christ is a London-based illustrator, designer and professional daydreamer working across editorial, event visuals, murals, merchandise and self-initiated projects rooted in print culture, music and her multi-heritage identity. Through intuitive mark-making, expressive linework and texture-heavy compositions, her work explores themes of identity, emotion, movement and the spaces between clarity and ambiguity. Selected clients and collaborators include New Balance, Adobe, University of the Arts London, Where Are the Black Designers, Gurlz with Curlz and publications like The Wire, Vittles, Chutney, Synonym and Scary Boots.
The full Vittles masthead can be found here.
I'm a massive, unashamed foodie who uses a microwave. I can fully relate to the tinge of shame. My latest strategy is just to shout 'Tim Spector says they're fine!'. Anyway, my combi-oven-microwave blew up last week and now I'm having to work out the best alternative. Apparently air fryers are packed with forever chemicals.... 🙄
My grandmothers, aunties and mum exclusively reheated stuff in the oven when I was young - I used to resent it because it took 10x as long but as an adult I don't own a microwave and I'm just used to it.