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This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to what people in the food industry are obsessed with eating, drinking, and buying right now.
The CRUXGG SATA 2-Slice Toaster can generate electromagnetic fields strong enough to withstand the force of nuclear blasts. It can manipulate the earth’s polarity, allowing it to defy gravity. It speaks multiple languages, can resist telepathic attacks, and commands an army of persecuted mutants who refuse to be treated like second-class citizens. It also toasts bread.
Okay, only the last bit is accurate, but this toaster is undeniably the X-Men’s sympathetic nemesis Magneto in countertop appliance form. It’s part of a seven-piece kitchenware collection, a collaboration between the Bronx creative and culinary collective Ghetto Gastro, appliance brand Crux, and Williams Sonoma. All sport a black-and-red color scheme and look like futuristic, sentient robots. The MUSA Air Pro is a combo air fryer-pressure cooker that has 11 different settings and may also be a Sith Lord. The BRED bread maker can turn out two-pound loaves in under two hours and bears a remarkable resemblance to Robocop.
While there are a few features that set the SATA toaster apart from the two-slice machine you already have—a bagel and a gluten-free setting, extra-wide slots—no one is buying this thing because it’s revolutionizing the toast sector. They’re buying it, yes, because it’s matte black and glows red and looks cool, but also because of what Gastro Ghetto stands for. Chefs Jon Gray, Lester Walker, and Pierre Serrao work at the intersection of activism, design, and community empowerment. They bill themselves as the “Black Power kitchen of tomorrow,” and they’re just as at home talking about the benefits of a mostly plant-based diet as they are about systems of oppression. Come for the merch drops and sexed up waffle irons, stay for the discourse about red-lining, the prison-industrial complex, and food as a liberatory tool.
So maybe the CRUGXGG SATA toaster can’t levitate. But Ghetto Gastro is fighting to dismantle the systemic marginalization of an historically oppressed community, and if that’s not some classic Magneto behavior, I don’t know what is.