AI and Food

Illustration generated using DALL·E 2.

Written by Ian Bowie

Food glorious food

I love food! There, it’s out, now you know. But I really do, I love everything about food, from growing some of it, preparing and cooking it, right up to eating it. But what have I missed out? Oh yes, buying it. That is something I find a bit of a chore, actually, I don’t like it very much at all.
Of course here in Finland, there really isn’t much of a choice as to where you buy your food from; we are limited to pretty much three supermarket chains and that’s it. Not for us the delights of the delicatessen or independent butcher.

Taking the boring out of buying food

But basically buying food in Finland is a real pain in the you know what. It is just sooooo BORING! I mean come on, can you honestly say you actually enjoy trailing round the supermarket with everyone else on a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning? Even if you can’t, I can certainly think of quite a few things I would much rather be doing with my time. And so enter AI to take the pain and boredom away. After all, once an algorithm knows what you like you don’t don’t need to worry about food ever again, or at least you shouldn’t.
Imagine a perfect world where you simply input all your favourite ingredients and meal preferences and your personal algorithm takes care of the rest. It orders all the ingredients from the supermarket, has it all delivered to your door, from where it is transported to the kitchen in preparation for the next meal.

AI Michelin magic

The algorithm knows what you want to eat this week and accordingly gets your smart kitchen up and running to create Michelin standard cuisine every day of the week. Starting to sound a bit too much? It probably does, but the reality is it aint that far away from being achievable. The ordering is a doddle, the delivery a breeze, it’s just the food prep and presentation where there is a bit of a gap.
But that gap is closing even as you read this, and it might not be very far into the future that you are enjoying a special night out at the lates Michelin starred restaurant where the newest celebrity chef is non other than Gordon the robot.