The microwave’s ‘add 30 seconds’ button offers an escape from cold digital precision

The microwave is a cooking tool designed with precision in mind. Indicate how long your food will take to reheat in the microwave, and that’s what it will do; No more and no less.

But despite all the precision that the microwave has – and that the microwave tries to impose on our food and cooking – the reality is that things can’t be put so neatly in a handy digital box. Life is not binary, so many microwaves have an “add 30 seconds” button to give us humans the wiggle room we need within the otherwise inflexible numbers of the countdown clock.

It is a button almost caveman-like to its intended functionality. Rather than calculating the perfect amount of time to reheat or cook your food, it turns out that the best way to use a microwave in real life is to just turn it on and keep going until you think the food is ready. And if not? Well, you just add 30 seconds.

Microwaves are almost ubiquitous in kitchens today and are relatively high-tech compared to a stove or an oven, which have remained largely unchanged in their basic functions for centuries. The basic technology is simple: Microwaves bounce radio waves to move the water molecules in your food and in turn create heat, turning your leftover pasta or frozen dinner into a quickly accessible feast.

When you cook with an oven or an open flame on your stove, there is an element of unpredictability baked into it. Sometimes that batch of cookies needs an extra minute; sometimes your eggs burn because you over-estimated how long they would cook. It’s hard to put most recipes or foods in an exact science box.

And yet we try to do that with the microwave. It’s no coincidence that most microwaved foods are pre-made: usually something that comes out of a box, complete with specific timing and directions, or leftovers taken from the refrigerator, taking the remains of a previous meal being zapped into a ghost of his previous self.

But the “add 30 seconds” button is a crack in the microwave’s cold digital armor, a control area that allows users to go beyond their allotted time to sneak in for a few more seconds to achieve the perfect results. It reminds us that life isn’t always exact or predictable, and that time is at your side.

Because sometimes a few extra seconds can make all the difference.