Food
is one of the few remaining artistic media to have escaped
computerization, but it is inevitable that someone will eventually
invent a computerized food generator. At first, there will be a movement
toward digitization-- converting the best hand-made dishes and making
them reproducible with 100% accuracy in anyone's kitchen. This will be
followed by the inevitable debate as to whether the generators
reproduce the original dish 100% accurately or whether you can "taste
the digital artifacts." Eventually, though, it will be a moot point,
because chefs will stop using the food generators simply as a
distribution mechanism and will embrace them as a medium of expression,
thus allowing them to synthesize new and different flavors that wouldn't
have been possible without computers. But then, someone will inevitably
invent an AutoFlavor feature. The best chefs will use it as it was
intended-- as a way of accentuating the positive and eliminating the
negative. Some urban chefs will even embrace it as a way to make their
food taste intentionally computerized and thus obviously unique. Among the mass marketeers, however, AutoFlavor will become a tool of expedience,
used to hide a lack of talent so that chefs can be marketed based on
their looks rather than their skill, or as a way of pushing true
culinary talent to churn out way more new dishes than would otherwise
have been humanly possible. Eventually, the average American palate will
become so accustomed to AutoFlavor that any dish that wasn't prepared
with it, including the lovingly hand-crafted dishes of decades past,
won't even taste good to them anymore.
