While gathered with extended family at Thanksgiving, I’m sure all of us try to avoid discussing controversial topics.
Politics, religion and old family disputes are off the table. This year, as always, I tried hard to keep it civil, but I opened up a can of worms, anyway. Pretty much literally.
The tale unfolds a few days before the Big Day, while my husband and I were spending time with our two Kansas City kids and their families.
Wouldn’t it be nice, we thought, if we cooked both branches a vat of homemade chili and cornbread (a speciality of the Festus Besses) in the busy days before they treated us to turkey and fixings?
So, we went to the store and stocked up on chili ingredients, discovering that in KC you had to buy your chili beans in numerous small cans rather than in one big one, like around here (where, let’s acknowledge, we tend to do things right).
No problem. We’d just use an electric can opener to get inside those itty-bitty cans of chili beans, canned corn, diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, Rotel and black beans. There were lots of grocery bags and two mountainous stacks of cans, one for each family.
Thankfully, cornbread mix comes in a box.
My daughter was at work when we started cooking at her house. I browned the ground turkey and Italian sausage while my husband searched for the can opener.
He’s the sous-chef at our house (he opens cans) and I’m the chef (I dump the contents into the pot).
He looked in the pantry, in the cabinets, above the refrigerator and below the sink. Two manual can openers turned up, but nothing with a cord.
One does what one must. Gritting his teeth and emitting noises like an enraged orangutang, he got those cans open.
“Where’s your electric can opener?” I queried my daughter when she came home with the kiddos in tow. (Ahh, an easy Christmas present, I’m thinking.)
“I don’t have one and I don’t want one,” she replied.
She’s no longer a teenager, so I try to be tactful these days.
“You’re crazy!” I sort of yelled. Turns out she feels scarred by a few bad experiences with electric can openers – faulty lid magnets and spilled contents. Hence, it’s all manual, all the time.
Move on, child, move on.
And that’s what we did, to our son’s house
Another batch of chili, another raided kitchen. No electric can opener anywhere.
I know it’s best not to yell at your daughter-in-law, so I kept an even tone when I called her crazy.
She was a champ high school and college debater, so her list of reasons was like that:
“An electric can opener takes up counter space or cabinet space, and if I have something bulky in my kitchen, it needs to serve more than one purpose.
“An electric removes the whole lid, which is messier. It’s less convenient and more expensive.
“I actually like the tactile experience of cranking a can open – what can I say?”
Six points in all. And, she told me, her mom is on her side. That’s extra points (glad I never competed against her).
When my other daughter-in-law chimed in at the big meal that she’s on the manual team, too, I realized something is going on.
Google, Reddit and Wikipedia explained it to me: Electric can openers are out of fashion.
My college roommate uses a manual, as do my sister-in-law, Valerie, and her daughter, Amanda. Six of the nine women who ate lunch with me last week to wish Pastor Leslie of Selma Baptist Church a happy birthday use manual ones, too.
Reddit offered lots of reasons (a few overlooked by even my debater daughter-in-law), but this was my favorite: “How’s an electric can opener going to help you in the Apocalypse?”
Wikipedia tells me the first patent for an electric can opener was awarded in 1931, with widespread popularity not occurring until the 1950s.
For that, we can thank a guy named Walter Hess Bodle, who invented a freestanding device that combined an electric can opener with a knife sharpener. He and other Bodles crafted their prototype in his garage (with help from his daughter, Elizabeth, who molded the casing).
This reminded me to ask my niece, Elizabeth, for her opinion. Another vote for manual (she concedes she’s not the family cook, but I counted her vote, anyway). For the record, the cook in their household said she finds electric can openers “damn annoying.”
Seven decades ago, the Bodles were off to the races with the next big thing. I wonder if any of them are still around to have their feelings hurt – in more ways than one. Pop-top cans, anyone?
Oh, sure, a few of us are still fans of electric can openers, those who find manual can openers difficult to operate because of physical or mechanical issues (check, check, for me). But in 2023, there is disdain, big-time, for the Bodles’ bodacious brainchild.
If you’re still using electric, ask your friends and family members to see for yourself.
Just maybe not ’round the holiday table.
