Hand Mixer No Longer Real?

My eleven year old loves to try to help me with the papers I do for college. So, I explained the theory of Baudrillard to her to the best of my ability (and own understanding J), and after a couple of tries, she came up with the idea that the mixer as we know it, is not the real mixer, but it is actually more real than the original. Not bad for an eleven year old, especially when I think of how I have wrestled with trying to understand this theory myself. I am sure that we all remember the original mixer. It was actually quite handy; because we had it with us at all times and didn’t have to worry about whether or not our friend had one when we went to bake at her house, because it was our own hand. Technically, we even had two each, although one was usually a much stronger mixer than the other. Eventually, some ingenious individual, created the “hand” mixer. This style of mixer was basically just two beaters attached to a gear, which was attached to a handle, which you turned. Shortly after this, however, the mixer was reified yet again. With the help of electricity, we were now able to mix our cake batters simply by holding an electric mixer, which was still the same concept as the hand mixer, but was able to turn much faster, making mixing that much easier. Today, of course, the mixer has been reified yet again, and today we don’t even have to hold the mixer. The Kitchen Aid is today’s idea of the perfect mixer. Not only can it blend dry ingredients, but it comes equipped with three different hooks and various powers, which can mix, knead, and whip, so that you can make everything from cake, to bread dough, to whipping crème. Obviously, the original “real” mixer, our hand, is still very real, however, to those of us who enjoy baking, it is nearly irrelevant as Kitchen Aid, who makes everything from mixers to ovens, has constructed their mixer as an “Aid” in the kitchen. They have convinced the consumer, that their product can do it all, and without it, we would be lost in the kitchen, even though bread, cake and whipping crème were all created along time before the mixer of today.