That all may sound a bit overheated, but to be fair, the technology of the meal hasn't profoundly changed since the introduction of the microwave oven in 1955.
 As data, artificial intelligence and robotics intersect in the home, the everyday meal is ripe for disruption.
 The room we call the kitchen might end up becoming as quaint as a fireplace – nice to have, but not necessary.
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 In a way, it's not a huge advance over Dick Van Dyke's mechanical kitchen in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
 But systems like this will get smarter and more flexible, using artificial intelligence to learn how to make meals and figure out where to find the ingredients.
 Add up the various inventions that are in the works, and the robot cook starts looking like more than just a labour-saving daydream of a nerd with 10 kids.
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 Robotics are getting so good, so quickly, there's no reason to think robot cooks won't make their mark first in high-volume food preparation enterprises and, later, homes.
 Swizzle together a robot chef plus food data and artificial intelligence, and you have a home cook that can be as good as any celebrity chef – or even your mother.
 Maybe the best way to automate cooking will be to build a kitchen suited to robots instead of humans – like a self-enclosed, self-cleaning unit of stoves and arms and blenders that sits in the basement and sends finished plates up through a dumb waiter.