Dominic Pargetter, 34, of St Albans, uploaded a video to TikTok on Tuesday 15 September 2026, filmed in a friend’s kitchen in Hitchin, in which he stood beside a Ninja AF400 and said, at minute eleven, ‘this is not a kitchen appliance, it is a small plastic prison for a potato’. He does not own an air fryer. He owns a microwave and a Breville sandwich toaster. The video was viewed 2.1 million times before his employer, a podcast network called Earwax, asked him to remove it. He declined.
The Guardian calls it a manifesto and the Times calls it a warning
By Friday the clip had been embedded in a Guardian long read under the headline ‘The Air Fryer is a Class Weapon’, and a Times leader described it as ‘the most important piece of food writing since Orwell on the kipper’. Your correspondent has read Orwell on the kipper. It is four hundred words about a fish. One does not say this in polite society, but there it is.
Dominic gave a follow-up interview to Radio 4’s Today programme in which he said the phrase ‘culinary atomisation’ four times and admitted he had never actually cooked anything in the appliance. The interviewer, Mishal Husain, asked him what temperature he would recommend. He said, ‘I don’t do temperatures.’
“I don’t do temperatures,” said Dominic Pargetter, 34, of St Albans, speaking to the Today programme.
One has heard this line before, usually from a man in a motor-car who has just reversed into a hedge.
Westminster discovers a new constituency of one
On 1 October the Department for Levelling Up announced a £340,000 consultation, chaired by the Conservative MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, Sir Alan Bletchley, into what it called ‘Air Fryer Loneliness’. Sir Alan said the consultation would consider whether the appliance ‘undermines the communal oven’. The communal oven, your correspondent notes, has been undermines since 1962, when the last woman in Britain stopped baking her own bread and started watching Coronation Street instead.
Dominic was appointed as a special adviser at £900 a day. He told the committee he had ‘seen things in that kitchen in Hitchin that would make a bishop weep’, by which he meant a single man eating a halloumi wrap over the sink.
“I have seen things in that kitchen in Hitchin that would make a bishop weep,” said Dominic Pargetter, special adviser to the Department for Levelling Up, giving evidence to the select committee.
One has seen a bishop weep. It was at a bring-and-buy sale in Dunstable, and the cause was a hat.
The appliance itself declines to comment
Ninja, the manufacturer, issued a statement saying it was ‘proud to support British households’ and offered Dominic a free AF400 in perpetuity. He accepted, unplugged it, and put it in a cupboard in his flat in St Albans, where it remains. The cupboard is next to the one with the Breville in it. Your correspondent imagines the two machines sit in the dark, not speaking, like a divorced couple at a christening.
Aldi then hired him to consult on the packaging of its own air fryer range. His advice was to print the words ‘Eat Alone’ in 48-point type on the front of the box. Aldi did so. Sales rose 14 per cent.
“Eat Alone is the most honest piece of copywriting I have seen in this country since the war,” said Dominic Pargetter, brand consultant, at the launch of the Aldi range in Basingstoke.
One is now informed that the war in question is the Falklands. Well.
Your correspondent attends a tasting and is unmoved until she is not
Your correspondent was dispatched to a demonstration kitchen in Crouch End, where Dominic Pargetter prepared chips for a select committee, a photographer and a woman from Ofcom. He spoke of ‘the violence of the drawer’ and ‘the loneliness of the perforated basket’. The photographer asked him to hold a chip up to the light. He did so for four minutes. The woman from Ofcom wrote something down and looked at her watch.
Your correspondent, who had a small sherry in her coat pocket and took it, found the chips to be excellent, hot, and ready in eleven minutes. The sherry was a Harvey’s Bristol Cream, which is the only sherry one can buy in Crouch End after three o’clock, and it did its work. One is now informed that the appliance under discussion is not the air fryer at all but the Ninja Foodi 15-in-1, which is a different machine, and that Mr Pargetter has been reviewing the wrong one since September. Well. The chips were very good.
“I have never used the appliance, and I never will,” said Dominic Pargetter, author and broadcaster, at the Crouch End tasting.
One respects a man who knows his own mind. One does not respect much else about him.
The friend in Hitchin receives a council tax rebate and a book deal of her own
Priya Mistry, 36, whose kitchen was used for the original video, was informed by St Albans City and District Council that she is owed £41.20 in energy rebate for the period of filming. The council described the sum as ‘a gesture’. It is a gesture in the way that a waved hand through a car window is a gesture.
She has since signed a deal with Faber for a memoir titled ‘I Let Him In’. Dominic’s own book, ‘The Small Plastic Prison’, will be published next spring. He has not cooked since. The AF400 remains in the cupboard, unplugged, beside the Breville, and the Breville has been there since 2011, and it still works, and nobody has ever written a Guardian long read about it.
Your correspondent will die, as we all will, in a kitchen, alone, with the drawer open and the timer beeping, and nobody will come. It will be raining. It is always raining. One has brought a small sherry for the occasion. One has brought two.
