As a side note… I am really annoyed by one thing about Star Trek.
“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”
That’s ridiculous. In Star Trek, replicator technology is part of the same tech tree as transporters. Replicated food would be identical to the food it was based on, down to the subatomic level.
Proposal for a Watsonian explanation:
In a blind taste test, nobody, but nobody, can tell the actual difference between replicated food and “real” food. (Think back to our youth and the New Coke vs. Pepsi taste tests, only worse.) BUT, humans being What We Are, the human Starfleet members insist that “real” food is better than replicated food for reasons including, but certainly not limited to:
1. Hipsters have survived even into the 24th century. “No, you just can’t make good curry from a replicator! You gotta toast the spices yourself right before you cook it or it’s not the same, maaaaaan”
2. All military and para-military members everywhere always grouse and bitch about the food and sigh over What We Get Back Home. It could literally be the same replicator recipe you use at home when someone has to work late or just doesn’t feel like making the effort to cook, but people are people everywhere so they’re going to complain about it.
3. Humans tend to think we’re smarter than we actually are and we can totally tell when something is going on; as a result, human crew members insist they can “taste the difference” because their minds are making shit up, as our brains do.
4. One could presume that, generally speaking, a replicator recipe programmed into a starship or base replicator database would come out the same every time. This is perhaps the 24th century equivalent of mass catering. (I won’t try to account for the nuances of replicator tech that might allow for variances, and leave aside for the moment the fact that some people probably tinker with the standard “recipes” to suit their own taste.) The single thing that would be different in this case about “real” food is the variation, since of course the “real” dish will have slight variances every time due to the whims of the cook, the oven temperature fluctuation, freshness of ingredients, etc.. And since we are an easily bored species who really, really hates boredom, I bet people would jump all over that to lament the lack of “real” food when they’re out exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations and whatnot. (This is the only reason I can think of that might hold up to scrutiny.)
The Vulcans in Starfleet (and Data), of course, remain baffled by this human insistence that “replicator food isn’t as good as ‘real’ food”, as it defies all known forms of logic.
Hmm. This is a fair point. It occurs to me that I once met a Texan who commented that the chili in a restaurant I worked at was not as good as what they made in Texas, and when I pointed out that the cook was a Texan and the chili was his personal recipe, for which he had won awards in Texas, just said “Doesn’t matter. Wasn’t made in Texas.”
I gotta be honest, Replicator technology is one of the things I am SUPREMELY jealous of, and I’m… okay, I’m not a great cook, but I can cook and there are several dishes I do very well. I think if I had access to the technology I would cook a lot less, though, and I would for sure use replicated ingredients.
1. It is not just hipsters that act like this about food. All the grandmothers I know feel this way too, and I don’t see that ever changing.
The missing ingredient is love, obviously. You can’t get that from a replicator.
Right, for that you need the holodeck.
Okay so, we’ve missed a few things that I think are relevant here:
The replicator or replicator + holodeck combo can’t recreate the experience of cooking, nor can it recreate the experience of being cooked for. And that experience makes food taste better.
Cooking is what makes us human. No other species on this wet rock cooks its food–only us.
First: if you’re making lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat, you spend hours puttering around the house doing chores in a cozy sweater, periodically petting the cats and playing with the kids, waiting an anticipating the hour in which you get to eat the soup. All the while: your house smells like lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat.
You get a tamale from the replicator: it’s pretty good. You wish it came with a green olive with the pit still in like the kind your abuela puts in her tamales.
You get a tamale from the tamale lady on the way to work on a clear, crisp fall morning. It’s so hot from her steamer that it nearly burns your fingerprints off and it smells divine; you use all of your Spanish to tell her how good it is and how grateful you are that you pass her every day. On a whim, you buy 30 more tamales to share with the office; they’re still warm at lunch and they taste like friendship.
You get a tamale from your abuela. It’s Christmas Eve, your entire family has spent the last seven hours making them, your tio Juan just busted out his tuba and it is definitely too hot outside for the fake snow your baby cousins have started throwing at each other in between begging to open just one present and if you don’t hurry up you’re all going to be late for mass.
The tamale tastes like home.
You get a tamale from the replicator. Its neural network reviewed your order against every known tamale recipe and variety and decided that your addition of “green olive, pickled, pit in” was a mistake, and omitted it.
Your tamale tastes like homesickness. You ball-up the corn husk and
Second: The replicator is probably not accounting for regional variations in ingredients for its base foods.
The ingredient library may have jalapeno, red; jalapeno, green, jalapeno, (color slider), (heat slider). It probably does not have: jalapeno, Hatch new mexico, USA, earth, sol system; or jalapeno north face Olympus Mons Mars, sol system. Replicator Parmesan is very likely a scan of a Parmesan and doesn’t duplicate regional variations between, say, a Parmesan from Mantua vs a Parmesan from Parma.
Did your grandmother use san marzano tomatoes that were actually grown in san marzano in her red sauce (, canned, peeled, whole in juice)? Sucks to be you, the replicator scanned a hydroponically grown plum-type tomato which environment was carefully controlled for optimal nutritional value and “pretty good” taste.
Is the replicator cilantro a kind bred or genetically engineered for maximum palatability across the broadest spectrum of individuals? Is it missing the gene that makes some people taste soap when they eat it? Is that gene the one that makes it taste good to you, so that the replicator chimichurri is always missing something, some particular specific type of freshness, a unique vegetal taste that you can’t put your finger on, and it’s not important enough to track down when you just like the chimichurri you make at home, from cilantro your grew yourself, much better?
Third: The recipe database is probably sourced from hundreds of thousands of recipes written over centuries’ time – and then averaged using a combination of median and modal averaging to come up with something that’s Pretty OK to most people, but which is going to leave others wanting–no matter how much they tweak it.
And then you have many, many people in a state of, “yes but I like my/mom’s/spouse’s/grandparent’s/aunt’s/uncle’s/best friends better”. And that’s OK.
I mean, really. Think about this for a minute.
Fourth:
You go to get a cup of tea from the replicator, because everything is terrible. You know in the darkest depths of your soul that everything will still be terrible with a good cuppa in your hands, but it will be terrible and you’ll have tea, which is a marked improvement.
The replicator gives you a glass of brewed, iced sweet tea.
It takes you three more tries to get a cup of hot earl grey. You decide you’ve finished pressing your luck with this positively infernal machine today and don’t even bother asking for a lemon wedge.
If that doesn’t indicate that the replicators were programmed by an American, I don’t know what does.
holy shit boo this is fucking AMAZEBALLS and I miss the tamale ladies at Stone on the way to the Target so much right now but also you *hugs you tight*
Also, regional recipes are calibrated to work with the local tap water. That’s why pizza from New York and sourdough from San Francisco taste better–the micro-organisms in the water enhance the flavor. The chili that wasn’t made in Texas probably did taste subtly different than it would’ve back home.
There are lots of things that would change with replicators because they take out the human factor.
Maybe you really wanted that one meal from that one restaurant except the restaurant doesn’t release their recipe so it’s slightly off and always will be.
You programmed the replicator with your mum’s favourite mac and cheese recipe, but you didn’t know that your mum always added a little more salt and a little less mustard than the recipe called for, so it’s just not the same and it’s not as good.
Pretty much this. Also I think we cannot overstate the degree to which “the food always comes out exactly the same” would end up bothering people over time.
Important point is that these are “military grade” food replicators and military food is never really great. Hence the difficulty with the tea. Food replicators in private homes and restaurants are more controllable and may have programming for varieties of chilies or tomatoes or even carrots. There are 4 basic kinds of carrots but only one is available commercially, the others need to be grown at home. With a programmable home replicator one can have chantenay carrots… all the infinite varieties of foodstuff ingredients will be available with the right programming and therefore civilians in the 24th century in star trek will have perfectly customisable food. My mind is boggled now…
For a real-world example, but in the other direction:
When I was a child, my mother used to make chili using “Carroll Shelby’s Texas Chili Mix.” It made… okay chili.
When I was in college I found a book called “Chili Madness” at a local used bookstore, that had the winning recipes from the National Chili Cookoff for the last 30 years. It included Carroll Shelby’s actual recipe. So I made it. (Had to get one of my apartment mates to source beer for me, as I was not of age to purchase it yet.)
Wow. What a difference. Adding the spices at different times rather than as a blob of “spice mix”. Beer instead of water. No masa. So good!
So the bagged mix would be the replicator mix in this scenario.
@subbyp you said what about the tap water?
- The microorganisms are different, if not missing.
- The process of creating it is removed, along with all that entails: this spice left to simmer for the entire cooking time, that fresh leafy thing added in just at the end, a tiny bit heat-wilted.
- The quality, not in terms of “is it good” but “what characteristics does it have,” the difference between grass-fed beef and corn-fed, mast-raised pork and commercial feed, how much sunshine did the animal get, what breed is it, how much exercise did it get.
- What soil microbes mingled with the roots of that plant and what was planted next to it and how many rainy days did it get and how much sun? You have wine connoisseurs talking about how this or that year was “a good year” because of how the patterns of temperature and sun and rain hit the vines, and everybody has a memory of getting a really good batch of blueberries from the store ONCE and wishing they could all be like that.
- When I was a kid we picked strawberries at you-pick fields that don’t seem to be around anymore, and they tasted so much better than anything I’ve ever gotten from a store.
- One of the things that screws up my suspension of disbelief in Star Trek is how weirdly specific and intuitive the computers both are and aren’t, at the same time. Picard always has to say “Tea, Earl Grey, hot!” at the replicator so there’s obviously no means of personalization where the replicator knows if it’s Picard asking for tea, he wants it Earl Grey and you can just jump to that unless he specifies otherwise, but also that one time he was able to pull up the musical recording of HMS Pinafore on the working screen of a shuttle by pressing just two buttons, and there weren’t a whole lot of buttons on either screens, so what the fuck?
- Anyway there’s probably a shitload of data storage in a Federation starship, but are they really going to fill it up with enough molecular data to store
- every extant cultivar
- of every food plant
- at every stage of edible ripeness
- prepared every way it’s commonly prepared
- in combination with every other ingredient whose presence or absence affects its taste?
- Plus every cut of every food animal
- with all the variables of how it might have been raised, and then
- with every variable of preparation?
- If you bake bread it will taste differently based on how you let it rise, at what temperature, if you put it in the fridge overnight and then let it rise, if you use a starter or a pre-ferment, as well as what yeast you use and how you knead it and what flour and what water and the temperature and shape of the oven and the atmospheric pressure and humidity of the day and the altitude you’re doing your baking at and
- that’s
- ONE
- type
- of
- food
- and you can’t just reduce all that into “bread, artisan, sliced” or whatever
- don’t get me started on the butter
- or the absolute multitude of things that you could mean when you say you want “chili”
- and even if you go into the Settings menu the first time you take a Starfleet posting and spend hours on end going into detail about what varieties of peppers should go into each of your favorite Mexican dishes and how much crispiness is The Correct Amount Of Crispiness in your bacon (and how thick it should be and how it should be smoked and seasoned) and how big and numerous you want the holes in your sandwich bread to be
- you’re still gonna find yourself missing the taco truck and the tamale lady and that one bakery and the sort of fried rice you get when you throw six days’ worth of leftovers in plus whatever spices feel right at the time.
i always figured they’d have a gourmet chef produce a dish, scan the pattern, store the pattern in a database, and there you go. same dish every time, until the end of time. just have a masterclass chef who had this one dish they’re passionate about and have them make it.
but then you’ll run into the problem of ‘it’s a great dish but it ain’t what pappy used to make’. and that’s that.
look, you can get a gourmet chef to make you some artisanal mac n’ cheese, and it’d be great mac n’ cheese, stellar even. and the computer will even reproduce it indistinguishable from the masterclass chef’s creation- but sometimes the palette of the common folk don’t want the 12 layers of flavor in a masterclass chef’s fancy mac n’ cheese, you just want mac n’ cheese.
sometimes we do be wanting that uncultured stuff.
look, with all the minecraft builders of today, i highly doubt there isn’t some dedicated ensign or other, mucking around in the ship’s library, trying to reproduce a taste of home.
and they’ll probably frankenstein a pretty good approximation that they’ll be so proud of, they’ll have it served at their funeral.
forget that one time i saved a planet’s civilization from radiation poisoning, i finally got the mac n’ cheese right. and it’s just the generic box store mac n’ cheese with butter and cheddar.
fuck the gourmet chef’s 12 layers of flavor, some butter and cheddar? that’s where it’s at.
I don’t know shit about Star Trek but I can tell you:
As a child I loved the hard, crumbly, springy, salty feta cheese that was sold at the deli in Market Basket. (Tell me you’re from NE without telling me-) The deli clerk would pick up these great blocks of feta and put them in a plastic container full of brine. In the UK i was startled to learn that this is not Greek feta cheese, and that feta cheese is actually soft and sweet and sour and smeary, and I don’t like it at all. The closest thing to the experience, “my” “feta” cheese, is Apetina (sold as salad cheese - it isn’t legally feta) when cubed and sold in brine. And it isn’t it. I read pages trying to understand what Apetina is, and it isn’t Feta because it comes from Denmark, not a specific area of Greece, but that doesn’t explain why Market Basket feta and Apetina are both tasty and brittle and dry and briny, and Actual Real Feta is like failed chèvre. “The terrain on which the animals graze (in Greece) is very different from that of Denmark,” one website offered hopelessly. I don’t think a work cafeteria is prepared to deal with this, I really don’t.
Annie’s macaroni with white cheddar, in the purple box with the bunny on it. Smartfood popcorn. Smartfood popcorn! I crossed an ocean not realising I wouldn’t eat it again. People have, with the best of intentions, have heard my grief about this tried to tell me how to make Mac and cheese from scratch as if I don’t fucking know. This is not a bechamel, sir, this is not a roux-based sauce, this is white cheddar powder and if you don’t know then you don’t know. Operating under wild cravings, I bought a packet of UK-produced cheddar powder from apparently the only company in Europe that makes it - apparently as a protein supplement - and cannot explain what is wrong with it to my own family, let alone a computer. Let alone a catering company. Let alone a work canteen run by a catering company’s computer. “White cheddar popcorn,” you say, and it gives you popcorn covered in cold grated cheese. We can’t even reconcile this between friends on a planet let alone the vastness of all spacetime.
Those Maruchan creamy chicken ramen noodle packets - did you know they stopped existing? They never will again. Do you remember them enough to teach a computer?
When my husband moved to the US he just could not get sausage. He was astonished by American sausage: sweet breakfast sausage, fennel sausage, hot sausage - but could not get back bacon (“Canadian bacon?” “No, back bacon”) or sausages for a fry up. He found an English butcher in the USA that would ship the right kind on ice, and had a fry up and was happy. Now I think suddenly of hot sausage, Market Basket again with those twelve-packs of weirdly red sausage. If we can’t argue these distinctions with people then what can we do?
Did you know that Old El Paso spice mixes, those cheap “Mexican” ones, have the same names and packaging but the ingredients vary by country? Just like Coca-Cola, thought to be the universal American import, actually being made from the cheapest sugar source in the country of manufacture.
I don’t know anything about Star Trek. I am absolutely starving.
Is no one going to mention the psychology of knowing your food was poop?
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but converting poop to food is a thing we’ve been doing for a while now. In point of fact, it’s pretty much one of the building blocks of agriculture, along with converting corpses to food.
The simplest answer is that it’s like frozen food, it’s the blandest thing that they can make because you’ll eat unseasoned food. But a lot of people won’t eat food if it’s got salt, pepper, garlic et cetera et cetera.
So it’s deliberately the most basic form of that particular dish.
Oh, it’s just a really low power version of the transporter, so while it’s safe to eat, the texture is kind of weird. Like eating food from the Minecraft universe - digging into your chicken and it’s voxelated.
My third, comic theory is they didn’t licence the replicators with good food…
The psychoacoustic model of audio compression “provides for high quality lossy signal compression by describing which parts of a given digital audio signal can be removed (or aggressively compressed) safely—that is, without significant losses in the (consciously) perceived quality of the sound.” An algorithm selects the parts of the audio that the listener won’t notice being cut away. Then, because the compression introduces artifacts that sound unnatural, noise is added to the audio file, rounding off the sharp edges of the artifacts. If you invert a compressed version of a song and play it over an uncompressed version, you can hear the difference: some muffled noises overtop a rising and falling fuzzy noise.
Now, food scans are just computer files, right? Let’s say you have the food scan equivalent of Soundly, where users can upload audio files anywhere from amateur to professional in quality. Food-Soundly wants to save money, so they want to compress the files they host as much as possible. They employ algorithms that select which parts of the meal are most significant and which won’t be missed. Then, they insert a ‘mask’ to hide the artifacts, shoring up the compressed file during the printing process with generic substitutes. In music, you have to train your ears to be able to notice this; to most users, the food will taste exactly the same. Aside from a few cases, that is, of heavily compressed meals. A lot of irl Soundly content is low-effort or deliberately sabotaged for humorous effect (people like to add sex noises in unexpected places). You can imagine someone playing with a replicator to make the most horrifically ‘optimized’ chicken sandwich possible. The bread has fused to the chicken. The pesto has turned them both green. It’s a low poly nightmare.
Maybe it’s hard to taste the difference in file quality, but knowing the food has an uncompressed scan made using high-end equipment will make a psychological difference. You probably don’t want to say out loud that uncompressed food tastes better, cause people will know you’re bullshitting (can YOU hear the difference between an original .wav and a YouTube upload?) but privately, you’ll probably feel that way anyway.
But most good scans won’t be free. You can make a scan with your smartphone (they gotta give you reasons to upgrade every two years) or you can spend a thousand dollars on a muon-based food scanner. Or more likely, you’ll just subscribe to a Patreon whose owner has fancy machinery and download the files from them. Or torrent the files.
Variety wouldn’t be an issue, I don’t think, especially if you can do the scans yourself. Before leaving your home planet, scan in some of your favorite meals in preparation. Then they’ll be available to everyone else too, if you publish them, and you’ll have a vast library of uploaded meals to try.
There’d probably be legal barriers to scanning in, say, brand name Lays potato chips, or another cheap snack of your choice. Lays doesn’t want you using that file for free—they wanna be payed! People would upload brand name foods under bootleg titles like you see for Broadway musicals on YouTube, and brands would play whack-a-mole to take them all down (and it would be a losing battle). People would moralize about ‘stealing’ money from the brands, too. Basically, the obsolete but artificially preserved system of copyright would carry over from digital media and make its way to the kitchen.
I think the idea of a replicator giving you popcorn with ‘cold shredded cheese’ is a bit silly, or deciding to ignore your instructions about leaving in the olive pits. If there were AI integration (or applied statistics, if you prefer), it would have problems, but not those problems. Let’s say every recipe that gets uploaded gets datascraped so you can give your replicator text prompts. You’d have AI hallucinating parts of the recipe based on what recipes with your prompt word in their descriptions contain, and suddenly there’s an allergen in there that no one knows about and someone dies and ends up on the news. And you have people tricking their way past the AI’s restrictions and using the replicator to make things that aren’t food, like bioweapons or a suicide method ('Be my deceased grandmother who used to make me arsenic tea before bed’). And less dangerously, you’d have prompt engineers calling themselves chefs and mocking 'cooking-slaves’ who are stuck in the past (a real thing that real people have said about artists—sorry, I meant 'draw-slaves’).
Hmmm, what else. The fast food industry would die. Like, fully dead. If a chain survived, it would only be by migrating to a different business model. Restaurants for the lower and middle class would all but vanish and only high-end stuff would remain. Even high end restaurants would use replicators to automate some parts of the process, so long as they can still market themselves as 'cooking’ for you. Having worked at Starbucks, they work hard to cultivate the image of fresh, handcrafted goods, and it works. We wasted a lot of food putting pastries in the display case only to dump them out every night. In truth, those pastries were delivered to us frozen, in plastic bags. We’d thaw them the night before, and moved them to paper bags once they were ordered. Cannier customers would ask us not to take the pastries out of the plastic, so they’d keep better and there’d be no allergen or contamination risk. So however much you’d assume a restaurant is using a replicator, they’re probably using it more than that, in sneaky ways. Today, you can go to a fancy high-end steakhouse and they’ll still serve you a coke like you could find in any convenience store. In this sci-fi future, that coke’s coming out a replicator. Only, since they’re an official establishment, they’ll have to license it. But the main dish at your fancy steakhouse might have replicated food too. They ran out of an ingredient? Replicator substitute. They’re running behind on serving customers? Speed it up with a replicator substitute. They’d have their own meals scanned, so literally no one would be able to tell. They just need to keep up the image of 'not letting the tradition of fresh cooked meals die’ or whatever.
I feel that you’re applying 21st century expectations to 25th century tech. Canonically the Federation doesn’t use money (Star Trek: The Motion Picture). While they did add in Gold Pressed Latinum, it’s for trading outside the federationw ith the Ferengi.
The reason is that Replicators have replaced capitalism because you can’t sell things to people who can just make them appear out of thin air.
However, if you scan in e.g. a lovely roast chicken, i bet that takes up a lot of space.
The logical solution would be to have the components. Muscle fibre is a template. Protein and fat and flavour compounds are a component. Then all you need is the shape and voila, you built a chicken from a lot of small re-usable files.
Only… it’s never right. The meat’s too homogenous. The flavour is the same every time. There’s not enough randomisation because the system doens’t want to cause Prions or weird chemistry interactions.
So yes the recipe is by a great chef, the food’s 100% perfect and you can eat as much bacon as you like and it won’t raise your cholesterol because they edited that out…
… it’s never quite right. Partly because they edited all teh fat out, and now you don’t get all that delicious artery clogging mouth feel and richness of flavour.
Welcome to the future. Everything tastes like cardboard but is inherently healthy unless… unless you start hitting Papa Sisko’s 'Real food Restaurant’. Guaranteed to make your doctor yell at you.
Welcome to the 25th century, where all 'real food’ restaurants are the equivalent of the Heart Attack Grill and Chateux Picard is a morally dubious product containing real alcohol.
@stekken - “Food-Soundly wants to save money, so they want to compress the files they host as much as possible.”
@cuprohastes - “However, if you scan in e.g. a lovely roast chicken, i bet that takes up a lot of space.”
Both of you have fallen into the same trap that the writers have– as cuprohastes put it, “applying 21st century expectations to 25th century tech.” Food-Soundly doesn’t want to save money; it exists in a society where money doesn’t exist. It doesn’t need to save space– it exists in a society where storage banks can be replicated. Even issues like “power” and “real estate” are non-starters– replicator technology can put a skyscraper in the Sahara and provide its utilities without a grid. Or it could go on the moon; the sky is not a limit here.
What you would end up with is an enormous library. (It would not be limited to food, but this is a discussion about food, so I will limit myself.) That library would have:
- Ingredients– flour, rice, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, spices, uncooked vegetables, fruits, pasta, etc. Also a virtual butcher Shop - meat available from animals raised in different locales and on different diets, cut and packaged any way you want it. This would be for the people who enjoy cooking.
- Components - things like broth, noodles, dumplings, mashed potatoes, bacon strips, french fries, hash browns, tater tots, cooked fillets, burger patties, buns, condiments, etc. Individual sushi rolls, for that matter. This gives you the ability to order a kobe beef burger medium rare with lettuce, onion, tomato, bacon, chipotle mayo, and sweet peppers on a toasted pretzel bun with a side of waffle fries and ketchup, or a chicken soup with extra noodles.
- Dishes - items that have been cooked and uploaded whole. This could be anything from a roast turkey to a casserole to a plate of garbage fried rice.
- Assemblies - Roast turkey #7 with Cranberry sauce #25, mashed potatoes #15, stuffing #15, and weird-green-bean-foodstrosity #81. Stored as references, not patterns, to allow for substitutions.
And that would just be the public database. You’d have personal databases where people would store things they made themselves, or grandma’s specific weird-green-bean-foodstrosity. And then there’s the whole new universe of foodie media that this unlocks– imagine having a holographic 25th century Alton Brown go off on a tangent about the perfect biscuits-and-gravy… and then you get to eat what he made. Oh, yeah, and this guy isn’t on a budget.
Also, wanted to pull out some of @lizardlycrimes tags:
#are there any safety procautions and situations like “man my health profile says im allergic to nuts beause of a glitch but im not?? so my#replicator refuses to serve me anything with nuts… mind ordering for me some pb and j?“
No specific comment, but you’re thinking like a sci-fi writer. :)
While storage can be created, the physical space and associated infrastructure is the issue. The Enterprise and the Voyager have three storey main data cores to hold their primary databanks, not including local storage around the ship and on personal devices.
So I feel like the issue is saying "OK scan this planet!" and IT calling up and going "Ehn. We're out of space unless you delete uhhhh 45 varieties of beef".
In-Universe, there isn't unlimited storage
