When talking about air fryers, my husband once rightly pointed out that air fryers are just countertop convection ovens.

I walked over to him, held my index finger up to his lips, and whispered to him, "shhh. Air fryer. AIR FRYER." 🤣

Yes. And I think it’s important to understand exactly what a convection oven actually is.

At its most basic, it’s an oven with a heating element and a fan that circulates hot air around the cooking chamber. That’s it. The circulating air improves heat transfer and helps food cook and brown more evenly.

Now, manufacturers have increasingly started calling a particular implementation of convection an “air fryer” and charging a premium for it, as though they’ve invented an entirely new cooking technology. They haven’t. Convection cooking has been around for decades.

An air fryer is essentially a compact, highly optimized convection oven: hot air is circulated rapidly around the food, usually with a basket or perforated tray that allows that air to contact more of the food's surface.

So when you’re shopping for a range and you see one advertised as having an “Air Fry” function, don’t automatically assume you’re getting some revolutionary new appliance. In many cases, you’re paying extra for a marketing term applied to a convection system that has existed for generations.

Air fryers, and to a lesser extent fan ovens, use a fan to move the air rather than just using air convection currents.

To put it in perspective, that's just over 100 years out of 4.5 billion the earth has existed. Or 300 million years or so complex life existed (that mostly wouldn't be able to fathom the core concepts you'd need to know to even understand what having an air fryer means, where I'd consider "figured out that forest fires can contain more delicious food in some places (where intensity is high enough to cook plants and animals but not enough to turn them to charcoal)" to be pretty smart). Or several million that hominids have existed and using stone or better tools. Or several thousand since we figured out how to manage our food production rather than depend on always finding it. Or several hundred since we got much better at harnessing energy.

Also, I'd push back on a) the invention date being more relevant than the mass release date, and b) early convection ovens counting as "air fryers", so that 100 years should probably also be reduced.