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farticustheelder t1_ja5tqwt wrote

What a load of BS! I wish it was true but it isn't.

As a bit of background I've been waiting for 'auto chef' for about a decade.

Chef is the fancy word for cook. They go to school for it. and they can all take a standard recipe, standard ingredients, and produce standard results. The chefs of the star and superstar variety invent new recipes. There are a few dozen of the hyperstar variety who become world famous, the regular stars of the day who run 'starred' restaurants, and billions of everyday cooks (us, our mothers, and the folks running diners and food carts the world over).

Inventing recipes is dead easy: if you don't believe google meatloaf recipe and some 26 million people will disagree. If that doesn't convince you then expand your definition of meatloaf to include hamburgers (personal meatloaf?) and another 234 million, mostly distinct!, people disagree.

Cooking itself is not difficult. Learn to use the knife! That means learning how to chop veggies. Yeah when the recipe calls for julienned carrot you need to learn what that means and how to produce it from a raw carrot. You also need to learn how to carve up various pieces of meats. This part of cooking is basically prep work: get your ingredients to the stage that they are ready to be cooked. This is mise en place. Think of being at the counter ordering a pizza and watching them make it: a bit a flour, a dough ball, lots of technique and voila a naked pie! the sauce is premade, the ingredients pre sliced and diced and the pie gets tossed into the oven.

Watch it over and over again. There is nothing hard to pie making*! You can see it! Still the pizza maker is reasonably well paid and the automation crowd can't make a bot to perform this 'simple' job.

I picked pizza because it is so 'easy' to automate not to mention being absolutely delish. The pizza guy is stretching the dough and assembling the ingredients requested by the customer. The oven is at a constant temperature...and still I keep track of who is working at my favorite pizzerias.

Think about it. The dough gets made in an industrial sized food processor: automation require? add ingredients and hit start button. The sauce is canned. Slicing and dicing ingredients is a no brainer. If we can't automate that then there is something seriously wrong with our expectations.

Same thing when I hit a sandwich shop. Doesn't matter if it's a burgher, a dog, a ham and cheese on rye, or a really nice deli sandwich. People assemble them for me, not bots! Even kids can make sandwiches but it is beyond the capabilities of bots? Give me an 'effing break!

*Pizza pies only. making a proper crust for meat or dessert pies is specialist work..

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