Nuking Dinner

On our trip to Florida last week, we listened to several episodes of a podcast called “A Way with Words.” They discuss all things word-related, and people call in to get some background on words they’ve just come across and phrases they grew up with but never hear any more.

A young man, I think early twenties, asked where the phrase “nuking” food in a microwave came from. The hosts didn’t have a good answer for him. They talked about the possibility of people thinking nuclear fission was involved. The one host thought that was improbable since the it was clear the cooking was done by radio waves. “It’s right in the name,” he declared.

Really? I suppose most of my science classes were over and done with well before microwave ovens were available to the public. But I don’t remember ever hearing radio waves referred to as microwaves. Could just be me.

Then the episode was over, and I was surprised they never talked about what I thought it meant.

We were the first in our crowd to buy a microwave, in 1980. I have absolutely no distinct memory of the term “nuke” or “nuking” coming into being. At some point that’s just what most people called heating anything in the microwave.

If asked, I would have said that it was a joke based on how quickly food cooked. It’s one of those things where you have to be able to remember how long it took to cook anything in the pre-microwave days. Preparing something in a matter of minutes was space age technology. We leaped from the Flintstones to the Jetsons.

Not to mention that while we were getting the hang of cooking things in minutes, it was very easy to overcook your food. In that case, you often ended up with something that looked like it had been hit by a bomb—misshapen, with craters and burned areas. Nuked.

It’s one of those things that just seems obvious to me.

But nobody ever asks me.