I remember a Star Trek episode where some hungry crew members from the Enterprise tell a computer what they want for dinner. Suddenly, the food – plates and all – materializes out of thin air. Oh, that it were so.

With digital technologies revolutionizing almost every aspect of our lives, the kitchen is a glaring exception. What has Microsoft done for chefs lately? Not much.

When microwaves became widely available by the late 1970s, they were seen as magical inventions and created a major stir. But there has been nothing new since then. Stoves and refrigerators are dumb devices, and despite the hundreds of thousands of recipes posted on the Internet, people still wrack their brains trying to figure out what to make for dinner.

Is this some sort of conspiracy against the chefs of the world? Is Sony more interested in couch potatoes than those who slave over a hot stove? Not really. It’s just that no one has figured out how to digitize food. It’s still not possible to e-mail a pot roast to your starving son at university… at least not one that tastes any good.

It’s not for lack of trying. Companies such as Procter & Gamble, Whirlpool and Hewlett Packard are spending tens of millions of dollars on research centres such as the Internet Home Alliance to figure out how best to introduce digital technologies to the kitchen. The potential market is huge.

“The challenge,” says Tony Tsai, Manager of Global Household Care at P&G, “is to harness these technologies and the massive amount of information available online so that we simplify people’s lives and make their food decisions easier.”

Consider parents wanting to make supper for their kids. For a kitchen computer to be truly helpful, it should be able to answer the following question: “What should I make for supper this evening based on the ingredients I have on hand, my skill level, the time I have available and my family’s likes and dislikes?”

Even better: “What can we have for supper tomorrow, and which dishes can the kids get underway safely after school without waiting for me to come home from work?”

Along with being a lot smarter, appliances should also make the kitchen a fun place rather than one of cooking drudgery. In ye olden days, the kitchen – with its big table and warm wood stove – was the focal point of family activity. But with central heating and technologies such as TV and the Internet, the kitchen has lost its appeal. Now kids are surfing the web and instant-messaging their friends from their bedrooms.

A digital kitchen could lure them back. I’ve written previously on how a wireless laptop in my kitchen has become the focal point of our in-home music system. Since we’re all music lovers, we now gravitate more to the kitchen than we once did. Additionally, if there’s a burning question that comes up during a weeknight dinner conversation, we don’t have to leave the room to get it answered. Google’s right there to do the search for us.

My family isn’t unusual. This spring, the Internet Home Alliance wrapped up an eight-month study involving 20 Boston families living with state-of-the-art digital kitchens. Each family had broadband Internet connections to tablet-style computers and smart appliances such as stoves that could be controlled from Internet-connected computers or cellphones. These families found that all this technology actually made being in the kitchen more enjoyable and drew them together. It also enabled parents to better supervise their children’s Internet activities and to entice family members into lending a hand in preparing meals.

Said one participant about her newly wired kitchen, “If someone would have told me that technology would have brought my family together, I would have said they were crazy, but it did!” It’s all gravy from here on in… 

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Don Tapscott is a leading international consultant, author and speaker on information technology in society and business and the CEO of strategy company New Paradigm. Visit www.nplc.com or write to him at dtapscott@enroutemag.net.