How lazy have we gotten?

Pancakes in a can.

Like it's SOOOOO difficult to take your Krustez or some such pre-mixed pancake batter, add water, and stir. The most time consuming part about making pancakes is getting the griddle or frying pan hot enough to cook the pancake properly.

I weep for our future...

SAN FRANCISCO — You want pancakes, but the idea of adding water to powder and stirring it around just seems like too much effort. Enter Batter Blaster, the pancake you just point and spray.

Gastronomic genius? Or sign of the apocalypse?

It all depends on how you feel about really fast food.

The contents are pressurized and the can has a nozzle similar to a whipped-cream can, which can unleash artistic aspirations in the way of animal, geometric and letter-shaped pancakes.

Preparation: Shake the can firmly before spraying.

Clean up: Rinse the nozzle under running water after using.

The product, which is organic, comes more than a century after the launch of the first convenience pancake product, a powdered mix that eventually would be called Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix.

And Batter Blaster begs comparison to other ultra-convenience foods, such as Easy Cheese, and Reddi-Wip, the ubiquitous canned whipped cream.

Some flip for the pray-and-bake breakfasts.

"They're fantastic," says Keith Bussell, a Los Angeles software developer who picked up a can of Batter Blaster on a lark and was won over by the ease of making just one or two pancakes sans stirring. "It's not an approximation of pancakes. They're really good pancakes," he said.

Others don't.

"That is just wrong on SO MANY LEVELS!" Oakland accountant Beth Terry wrote in her blog review of the Batter Blaster.

In a phone interview, Terry said her big issue with the product, which she has no plans to try, is that it comes in a can, which she said takes an energy and resource toll even though it is recyclable. "It's not even necessarily about slow food," she said. "Pancakes are not slow."

Steck says the idea is to provide convenience "but it's also about being with a group, being with family. It's not the end of the world. It's just a better world, I think."

A single can, which makes more than two dozen 4-inch pancakes, sells for about $6.

The product is the brainchild of Sean O'Connor, a former restaurateur who was looking for a brisker breakfast and realized it wouldn't be that hard to put pancake ingredients in a can.

He was right. The tough part turned out to be squeezing cash out of investors, many of whom found the idea too out-there.