I think about this a lot. There's something fundamentally lacking in the way we cook and share cooking, that other arts have already solved.
When a musician creates music, they can record and share it with anyone who cares. Writers print books, actors make movies, coders make apps.
With cooking, we're still stuck in the live performance era. In a restaurant you can eat what the chef prepares and enjoy their art. But if you can't get to the restaurant or can't afford it you miss out. Famous chefs release cookbooks and film cooking shows where they let you watch them and you can try to recreate their craft for yourself, but that's not really sharing the food.
The problem is there is no food media. An actual dish can't be recorded, transmitted, and reproduced, and so we rely on storytelling about the food using other methods. Food is the subject but not the substance.
We've been here before, and we've moved beyond this before. The mass media of writing started with monks transcribing text, but then was improved by the printing press. Writing let us describe music on sheets that you could reproduce by hand at home, but the media of music really started with the wax cylinder, then the phonograph and radio. I think food will become the next major art to become a medium.
I disagree. I believe this actually puts food farther away from the common man, more esoteric than it really has to. Food is fundamentally different from the arts you mentioned. Some people may facetiously say that they can't live without visual arts, or music. To say you cannot live without food -- that is a true statement. Programming, painting, writing -- we only started doing these things relatively recently in terms of our full history, and were some near-extinction event to happen in the future (distant, but an absolute certainty), it is possible we may stop doing them in the future. But we will always be eating and drinking.
I can tell you that food can indeed be "recorded, transmitted, and reproduced" -- we do it by doing the cooking ourselves, learning from recipes and our imagination. Why should food be so hard? That it's considered an extraordinary feat to cook a wonderful dinner? Why should it be on par with painting a painting or writing a book? I assure you that if you ask any honest cook or chef, they will tell you that cooking isn't difficult. Their job is fucking hard, but the cooking itself? As simple as arts can go.
The upper limit of cooking has, admittedly, increased. This is a recent phenomenon. In the future, this may become easier as certain technologies become democratised, and the avant-garde again becomes the status quo. We saw this with Escoffier, Bocuse. We will see it again with Adria. A competent home cook will not miss out on the food of any great restaurant (bar the cutting edge, maybe?) as long as he/she is willing to learn a few tricks (with the restaurant book craze, there are no more secrets) and pay a bit more for groceries (thanks, globalisation).
I hope I don't sound too hostile. I didn't downvote you either (hah, don't even have the choice to). I just think that you're looking at food from too academic a viewpoint -- too high up. That's not to say that food cannot reach greater heights. But not in the way you predict or wish it to.
Of course, I do hope you visit more great restaurants. Having worked in the back of house of said restaurants, I do want your business! The experience of a restaurant transcends its food, and the unique whole package is of course, not replicable anywhere but in that restaurant. Would there be "restaurant media"? I don't know -- restaurant documentaries don't cut it, maybe the VR headsets we were promised a decade ago would be the solution?
Somehow I think that actually going to the restaurant is, in the end, the only way to do it.
(Whether or not the concept of restaurant will survive into the far future is another debate)
> Food is fundamentally different from the arts you mentioned. Some people may facetiously say that they can't live without visual arts, or music. To say you cannot live without food -- that is a true statement.
I fail to see the difference.
Nutrition is a solved problem. Just drink soylent.
So we are left to talk about the art side of food - taste, smell, feel, touch, look. Artistic composition of ingredients to create a pleasurable meal.
> A competent home cook will not miss out on the food of any great restaurant (bar the cutting edge, maybe?) as long as he/she is willing to learn a few tricks (with the restaurant book craze, there are no more secrets) and pay a bit more for groceries (thanks, globalisation).
But it's hard to reproduce food from recipe.
We need:
The difference is that food, by and large, is not even an art. And I'm saying that as someone who cooks professionally and looks up to the greatest chefs of all time. If you are not developing new dishes or pushing the edge of your cuisine, what you're doing is not really an art. People have to stop perpetuating the myth that food is this black box that just happens. It only serves to make some chefs richer and dumbs down the rest of us.
> Nutrition is a solved problem. Just drink soylent.
You're trolling right? Nutrition is not a solved problem. That's like saying medicine or human biology is a solved problem. We still don't know a lot of things -- what we need, what we want, what we should avoid. And I'm sorry to break it to you but Soylent is not a solution. Might be in the future, but drink it full-time in its current state? Not exactly nutritious.
> But it's hard to reproduce food from recipe.
I realise that not everyone is a good cook. But to be honest, practice goes a long way. You might think those few hours of your time are wasted, but I really think otherwise. We spend orders of magnitude more time reading, IMing, working. Spend one whole weekend cooking. I guarantee you'll be a much better cook. And it's a skill that will last you forever. It's also tasty.
> - better frozen/packaged foods
What's wrong with fresh food? (Not living in the USA, but fresh food is plentiful where I live). Even then, what's wrong with your frozen chicken breast? Cook it well, and it will beat out the offerings of most average restaurants.
> - detailed recipes
How detailed do you want them? I can recommend a few books if you want. Youtube helps too.
> - food 3d printers!
I actually don't know why you want this. Like, are you trying to replicate restaurant food with them? No restaurant I've heard of uses them.
PS: Throwaway account? You seem to be familiar with how to post on HN, yet your account was created only 10 minutes ago
It really isn't. Like any physical craft, it takes practice, patience, some failure, but a competent home cook should be able to recreate most of the classics from a recipe book.
>Why should food be so hard? That it's considered an extraordinary feat to cook a wonderful dinner? Why should it be on par with painting a painting or writing a book?
Painting a bad painting is trivial, as is writing a terrible book. (well, writing a few pages of a terrible book is trivial. writing a terrible 500 page novel still takes some stick-with-it, or at least a lot of cutting and pasting.) And cooking a not very good meal is pretty easy, too; Certainly no harder than churning out a few pages of bad fan-fiction.
Doing those things well is more difficult. And being truly great is difficult indeed.
In fact, I think music is a pretty good analogy here. It used to be that a lot more people participated in the making of music; singing was a pretty normal thing for normal people to do while working or even while making war. That just doesn't happen anymore; You could say that it is sad that the average man or woman can't sing at all, but on the other hand, we all have access to the very best musicians of our time.
I think it's worth bearing in mind that I was explicitly discussing a future "worst case scenario" for the upper-class culinary culture, and that ultimately nothing in the forseeable future actually prevents you from treating food with whatever set of values you want to. No matter how roboticized "The Best Restaurant In Paris" is, you'll still be able to buy a free-range chicken from your grocery store and pan-sear on your over to your tastes, nor will anything stop you from trying to open a restaurant with those values. (Said restaurant may fail, but new restaurants face an uphill battle in the best of circumstances.) The practices of "The Best Restaurant In Paris" probably have very little impact on $YOUR cooking today, after all, for $YOUR being all readers of this (late) comment.
I just noticed your username. Nice. I know people (with embedded software/control systems experience) who are interested in the 'cooking robot' concept. If I ever become rich, it's something I would invest in.
See, I think we need a "player piano" - something very rudimentary and limited, but that lets people exchange recipes. Personally? I would prefer to start with heat timing and control, as that's the sort of thing I tend to screw up the most.
"The problem is there is no food media. An actual dish can't be recorded, transmitted, and reproduced,..."
Sure there is. There are likely plenty of copies of various dishes in the freezer section of your local grocery mart. Some are, objectively, pretty good; others are likely just much better than you could do yourself.
>Sure there is. There are likely plenty of copies of various dishes in the freezer section of your local grocery mart. Some are, objectively, pretty good; others are likely just much better than you could do yourself.
Huh. See? I am a /terrible/ cook. Like one out of three times I try to cook something it is objectively inedible.
However... frozen foods? seriously?
Please link me to some that are "pretty good" - I mean, I want to believe you, but I have tried many, and so far have been quite disappointed, both by the cheap and the expensive.
Edit:
When I say "frozen foods" I mean TV-dinner style fully-cooked food. I practically live off of frozen chicken... the uncooked kind that you throw in the oven.
It's virtually impossible to be a great cook at home; commercial cooking equipment puts out a lot more heat than consumer equipment and it does make a difference. Take a simple roasted chicken: what comes out of your home oven will not be the same as what comes out of a commercial oven.
That said it's not difficult to prepare decent food at home; if you're unable to, maybe fundamentally it's just not something you care to do. Fine, nothing wrong with that, eat out or buy prepared food. If you don't like what's in the freezer, I find that the deli section of most supermarkets has a variety of prepared dishes that are ready to reheat and eat.
> It's virtually impossible to be a great cook at home; commercial cooking equipment puts out a lot more heat than consumer equipment and it does make a difference. Take a simple roasted chicken: what comes out of your home oven will not be the same as what comes out of a commercial oven.
You can create a great roast chicken at home. Very few dishes require a specialized oven or more than 450 degrees F.
The key difference between a home kitchen and a commercial kitchen is that in a commercial kitchen, you have more space, stocked ingredients, and more tools. And a bunch of apprentices to do stuff for you. You can cook everything at home that you can in a commercial kitchen, just less efficiently.
In fact, of all the home cooked dishes that is easiest to reproduce with minimal effort/intervention, I'd say roast chook it about the best/easiest/simplest.
I'd suggest people that say they can't cook, try to cook roast chicken from recipe. Make sure to use a timer and you really can't go wrong.
>It's virtually impossible to be a great cook at home;
I don't believe you.
I've eaten some absolutely mind-blowing meals made at home on mid to high-end consumer-grade equipment. Obviously, I wasn't the cook, and I'm no expert, but the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, as it were. I don't think restaurants can consistently match the better cooks in my family until they approach the $50/head range.
I am absolutely convinced that it's primarily skill and not equipment. I do think it is something I could get better at if I was willing to put a lot of effort into it. But it is a whole lot of effort, and it's not just the effort of learning, it's the effort of doing it every night. (In fact, putting the effort into /learning/ is on my to-do list. but even if I can, if I can pay $10 and avoid an hour of work, even if I can do that work well, I will.)
But if I could buy prepared frozen food (that took minimal effort on my part to prepare and clean up from) that was even just acceptable? I'd pay. It doesn't need to be mind-blowing, just 'good enough'
I mean, part of the problem is that it's a process; you have to plan what you want, then go pick out fresh food, then cook it, etc, etc. Which reminds me, I should set up the safeway delivery again. that was pretty cool.
>If you don't like what's in the freezer, I find that the deli section of most supermarkets has a variety of prepared dishes that are ready to reheat and eat.
Yeah... I usually get a rotisserie chicken once a week or so. Cheap and good. Most of the other stuff... well, maybe my standards are too high? but it's pretty hit and miss, and mostly miss.
This is funny. Commercial kitchens are better because there's more of everything - more ovens, more burners, more prep equipment, more fridge space - not because of more heat. The average home cook uses far too much heat already.
I'd rate DiGiorno pizzas fairly high, and also Beecher's Mac & Cheese. The frozen stuff that you stick in the oven for 40 minutes, not the results you get on Google.
Huh. I don't particularly like DiGiorno; I mean, it's not terrible, but considering the nutritive value of a pizza, I'm not sure it's worth it. I mean, a good pizza is worth it. Also, it's like 50% off actually getting delivery pizza (well, not quite 50% if you get a good one.) I'm probably better off throwing some frozen boneless skinless chicken thighs in the oven instead, if I'm not going to get something super tasty.
Also, I'm not sure if that counts as 'fully cooked' - I mean, it's not much easier than the aforementioned chicken thighs; also, the part of cooking I screw up most often? spacing out over the alarm and burning it. Really, some sort of convection oven that would automatically shut off (and somehow stop the food from overcooking?) would go a long ways towards solving that problem.
The /idea/ of fully-cooked food that you pop into the microwave for a specified period of time is pretty great for me; usually the cook time isn't long enough for me to get distracted and if I do, it's just cold, the fire alarm doesn't go off. But the reality comes up short. the only food I've been able to stomach like that is the "steam bags" of chicken alfredo.
Eh, DiGiorno started doing this new thing (or at least, a new thing showed up at my local supermarket) a few months back where they seem to layer on the herbs pretty heavily with good results. I would call their standard fare average, especially in comparison.
Interestingly, I was a fan of Newman's Own (the aforementioned steam bags) for a while, and then the quality of what I was getting seemed to drop, so I stopped buying them. I haven't done frozen pastas for months now.
Jack Daniels sells some stuff that looks nice; the frozen ribs turned out remarkably well for 5 minutes in the microwave. As meat, it's not great, but they've just done the herbs and spices in a way I find appealing. Put some garlic bread or instant mashed potatoes with it and it's pretty good.
Really, though, it sounds like we have significant differences in taste, so maybe you should take my suggestions as things to avoid. :D
Well, they are things to try. I actually haven't tried a steam bag /or/ DiGiorno for some time now. I've been doing the 'cook a weeks worth of food in the crock pot and freeze it' thing. It just seems so weird to me that a terrible cook like myself can make /frozen food/ that turns out better than the experts.
When a musician creates music, they can record and share it with anyone who cares. Writers print books, actors make movies, coders make apps.
With cooking, we're still stuck in the live performance era. In a restaurant you can eat what the chef prepares and enjoy their art. But if you can't get to the restaurant or can't afford it you miss out. Famous chefs release cookbooks and film cooking shows where they let you watch them and you can try to recreate their craft for yourself, but that's not really sharing the food.
The problem is there is no food media. An actual dish can't be recorded, transmitted, and reproduced, and so we rely on storytelling about the food using other methods. Food is the subject but not the substance.
We've been here before, and we've moved beyond this before. The mass media of writing started with monks transcribing text, but then was improved by the printing press. Writing let us describe music on sheets that you could reproduce by hand at home, but the media of music really started with the wax cylinder, then the phonograph and radio. I think food will become the next major art to become a medium.