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Tag Archive for Sci-Fi

Food as Art with Robots

 

http://www.industrytap.com/robot-master-chef-cooks-2000-recipes-cleans-dishes/28765

 

God, I want to love this.  I really do.  Robots in my kitchen would just be too d*amn cool.  I’d actually host parties, like TONS of parties just so I could watch this thing work.  I’d be fat as a house because I would just ask it to cook dish after meal after snack so I could watch those beautifully animated arms chop carrots and make fresh pasta.  Really, tech this sexxy could be my undoing.

But it’s not quite right.

I get the idea that freshly made food almost always tastes better, presents better.  I get that idea that the precision and handling of the food, directly mapped from the hands of a professional, can give you an extra bump in quality, can give you extra style and flair.

But this is all mechanical.  This is all engineering.

Food is is the fine split between science and art.  It’s being able to adjust on the fly because the last batch of tomatoes was a little underripe, or you ended up with baby carrots instead of full-size, slightly imperfect horse-carrots, or you have plain old sea-salt in the larder instead of rose-colored Himalayan salt.

This robot can handle the mechanics of preparation, which is definitely an important part, but that will not change the *taste* of the ingredients that go into the dish.  So while you might have something that looks super-sexxy on a plate, it still might come out tasting like something out of a one star diner if your ingredients aren’t quite up to snuff.

And the robot won’t be able to tell the difference.

The Return to Delicacy

http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/18/bocusini-will-3d-print-your-food-like-a-fine-robotic-pastry-chef/?ncid=rss

There needs to be a place for whimsy, even in our food.  It would be an easy thing to reduce all of our nutritional needs to a foil-pack of slightly gluey nutrients (in-fact, Soylent has done just that).  But for many people now, and in the future, there is a connection with the physicality of food that satisfies almost as much as the contents of the food itself.

Will this kind of delicate confectionery construction take over your supermarket shelves?  Will everything we consume be reduced to frippery?  Just like some people like their sandwich meat thin sliced and others thick, the 3d printed food will be a delight to a portion of the market, and a pain-in-the-ass to the rest.