we were just as smart then as we are now

It has a little hook on the back, so you can hang it off the edge of the pot, and it doesn't get your stove messy or your ladle contaminated with stovetop germs.

It has a pointy front that gets right into the bottom corner of the pot so you can scrape out the last bits of salsa or jam.

It's got pouring spouts on either side, so left or right handed people can easily use it.

If you fill it right to the top, it holds exactly enough to fill a half-pint jar with 1/4" head space, the correct amount of head space for most water bath recipes.

It's pretty! It's red and white! Look at this pretty red scoop with its pretty white handle!

The person or people who designed this object did so with deep knowledge and understanding of the process of canning food. They made it beautiful and functional. This and its matching funnel are probably literally the best $25 I've ever spent on any hobby.

But I'm really just overwhelmed about how much thought went into this simple object.

Epicurious's Youtube channel has an ongoing series where they have a professional design and usability expert test out kitchen gadgets and talk about the design of them.

His name is Dan Formosa and he's been working in the industry for forty years (apparently he was on the team that designed the original IBM home computer?????) and he's got the charisma of a Brooklyn grandpa with a very straightfaced kind of humor for who seeing his grandkids is the absolute highlight of his week.

He has a few gadgets to go through in each video and he tests them out normally, and then again using his off-hand covered in oil to give him a sense of how well it can be used by people with disabilities that make it hard to grip things. He does a comparison test between the gadget and a tool you probably have at home that you would normally use (eg I think there was a whole video of just avocado processing gadgets so he compared using them to just using a knife and spoon) to see if it actually saves any time or hassle.

Then he sketches out changes he would make to the design to make it more effective/easier to use and talks a bit about the design and testing process and sometimes he has some insight into why something was designed the way it was. He explains every bit he wants to change and why it's not as effective as it could be, and the changes he would make and why it would solve the problem he identified.

Every so often he does find either a gadget that can't be saved, or that he genuinely thinks was already designed perfectly. And then he gives the gadget a double rating on how well it did the job it was designed to do, and whether it's worth your money and kitchen space.

I think it’s important to respect other people’s time, wellbeing and money so I don’t do it in situations where I know I’m in the wrong, like if I want to get into a place just for fun and someone could get in trouble for letting me in wrongfully I’d rather not.

But sometimes people just don’t understand why something is important in your situation so you have to turn it into something they understand. When I lived in England I constantly lied about being pregnant so gas station employees would let me use their bathroom because for some reason they didn’t have public bathrooms.

Or when my doctor’s secretary couldn’t get it into her head that my stomach pains were very serious and concerning and insisted I couldn’t get an appointment this month so that evening I “found” a lump that I was pretty sure was nothing but it meant I had a reason to call her the next day and get a new appointment immediately and when the doctor told me the lump was harmless I could tell her what my real problem was and she immediately scheduled ALL the tests and examinations because she understood how concerning it was. I just had to get past the fucking secretary with a lie.

Fuck I even support that elderly man who lied about having four children who were stuck in a house during a flood but when the rescue team got there in a dinghy they realized it was four dogs. The guy knew he had to lie because he was too sick to help them himself (able bodied people in the area were able to save their own pets) and they wouldn’t have helped him if they knew it was “just dogs”. In the video the rescue team can be seen choking up and padding him on the back while he cries with his scared dogs in his arms. The team is clearly not mad because they can see how important the dogs are to him but I have no doubt he was right in thinking they wouldn’t have helped if he had told them the truth.