As any home cook knows, it’s hard to make foods that taste the same two nights in a row. It’s even harder to make foods that taste the same no matter the season, as the compositions of ingredients change, or when those ingredients are shipped hundreds of miles. The industrial food manufacturers behind such marvels as Oreo cookies, Heinz ketchup, and Bush’s baked beans achieve this uniformity by relying on standardized recipes, careful process controls, and environmental management. In addition to these measures, one of the core ways they make foods that taste the same even if they change suppliers or alter an ingredient is through sensory testing.
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Have you ever tried two versions of a food and reported back which one you thought was better, like in the iconic Pepsi Challenge? Or have you spent time with friends trying to describe the different tastes in wines, chocolates, or olive oils? If so, you’ve participated in sensory testing. Industrial food producers use similar processes whenever they change the supplier for an ingredient in a recipe, relying on both humans and machines to analyze sensory characteristics and create standards of uniformity for each food.
The sensory standardization and technological precision that underlie the twentieth-century miracle of food that tastes the same and can be packaged and shipped thousands of miles differ drastically—at least on the surface—from foods found in high-end restaurant kitchens. Or at least it did until the culinary movement known as molecular gastronomy, modernist cuisine, or experimental cooking took off. In what may seem like a strange reversal, fine-dining chefs adopted the insights and technologies that made fast-food chicken nuggets possible and employed these approaches to create foods that defy traditional narratives. Bacon and egg ice cream? Some, like the French physical chemist and 2025 Sonning Prize winner Hervé This, have also echoed food technologists from earlier eras in suggesting that the molecularization of food “could save us from food shortage,” a high-end rebranding of the “science of survival” efforts of the early 1970s, when concerns about a booming global population collided with regional food shortages and supply-chain woes.
Both trends—the standardization of tastes and smells and the integration of food-science techniques into fine dining—play out in Erin K. Wagner’s story “The Middle.” The story follows Noah, head chef at the in-house restaurant of an exclusive high-rise hotel. At the story’s outset, the restaurant’s owner, Mr. Grose, kicks off a fractious strike among his staff when he purchases a culinary robot named Su-Chef. The human staff members feel certain that the robot isn’t merely intended to improve the food quality or to attract media attention, but rather to automate the restaurant’s operations and eliminate their jobs.
Noah, pressured to cross the picket line by Mr. Grose’s threats of shuttering the restaurant entirely, is cooking in a future where supply chains effectively deliver commodity staples like soy and chickpea (we can hope that these commodities are available because they’ve been planted to help remediate depleted soils). Meanwhile, other foods, like the beef Mr. Grose flies in from Japan, have become so rare that even chefs creating menus for a Michelin-starred restaurant cannot consistently buy high-quality meat. It’s Noah’s wild foraging activities, not widespread supply chains, that give freshness and variety to the Middle’s menu.
Despite its clever phonetic name, Su-Chef fails to truly act as a sous-chef. It carries the same fundamental programming failure that scholars of technology have critiqued for years: an operating logic that reflects the values of its programmers rather than its users. Su-Chef prioritizes production over consultation and collaboration, breaking a core kitchen code by making decisions without first speaking with the head chef. Noah thus finds himself with a pile of shredded rutabaga when he’d rather work with discs. Su-Chef cannot cross-reference its algorithmic suggestions for ingredients with the on-the-ground reality—although avocado oil might fit the moment, and even appear in a digital catalog, the disruptive effects of climate change on food supply chains mean that it may not actually be available. This programming failure for something advertised as the perfect solution to understaffed kitchens and the unpredictability of human labor is the first hint that the gap between hype and reality is far wider than Mr. Grose anticipates. (Never mind that although Su-Chef is adept with a knife, it struggles with crucial fine-motor kitchen tasks like tossing leaves in vinaigrette.)
Their promises remain limited by the scientific, technological, and linguistic complexity of extracting information about flavor.
Su-Chef’s creators claim that it can rapidly customize dishes and respond to culinary trends. Invoking the food technologists and molecular gastronomists of the twentieth century, the robot’s on-the-spot chemical analysis aims to optimize ingredients and produce and reproduce the same flavor profile for a recipe, adjusting for the variable characteristics of inputs. Su-Chef can also, supposedly, tailor recipes to match an individual guest’s taste preferences. These claims aren’t far-fetched: The food R&D firm Mattson recently rolled out a “team” of AI chefs to facilitate product ideation, and Givaudan, a major supplier of flavors and fragrances, offers a range of analytical and foresight tools to identify aroma preferences. These technologies may have a shiny glow. Yet their promises remain limited by the scientific, technological, and linguistic complexity of extracting information about flavor, and they depend on active collaboration with the “real intelligence” of human counterparts.
Flavor is an experience produced by the combination of tastes, smells, temperatures, and textures we encounter when eating. The quest to make scientific sense of flavor is relatively recent. Food writer and historian Nadia Berenstein notes that scientists and home economists in the 1930s and ’40s began developing an alternative to having experts (connoisseurs) taste things. These new procedures allowed laypeople to become measuring instruments of sensation capable of evaluating a range of products. Such approaches rely on statistical analysis—the scientists’ capacity to identify and visualize the mean and median (“the middle”) as well as variances and standard deviations. The aggregated middles, gleaned from decades of testing, are what Su-Chef’s programming implicitly relies on. Aggregated middles also make possible the creation of foods like chickpea-based fries and frozen desserts that can masquerade as the real thing.
Masquerading is exactly what Noah’s being asked to do: The restaurant’s finances seem shaky; rampant climate disruption has broken food supply chains; and, in this future Atlantic City, the slow recovery from a catastrophic storm still defines everyday life. Hurricanes, drought, heat waves, and floods—among the many disasters whose severity and frequency are amplified by a warming climate—are the enemy of supplies that depend on effective cold chains. The foods that best survive such shocks are processed; historically that meant drying, fermenting, salting, or more recently, canning. In contrast, twentieth-century food scientists introduced a slew of new processing approaches. From spun vegetable proteins that mimic meat (a precursor to “bleeding” veggie burgers) to seaweed extracts that stabilize, thicken, or bind ingredients together, the readily available foods of the twentieth and early twenty-first century have become deeply technological objects masquerading as things one might be able to make at home.
The quest to make scientific sense of flavor is relatively recent.
“The Middle” invites us to ask: What does it mean when high-end cooking transforms from a process guided by human hands into one pervasively mediated by technology? Granted, the kitchen, be it home, restaurant, or industrial, is already a thoroughly technological realm: Heating, refrigeration, canning, even a knife and a cutting board are all technologies. As such, the promise of Su-Chef is not all that odd; it’s just another gadget to accompany the electric pressure cookers, microwaves, air fryers, and sous-vide machines of our current era. Indeed, Su-Chef follows in the footsteps of experimental design fictions such as the industrial designer Doenja Oogjes’ Lyssna, a small object that allows your refrigerator to suggest what you might make with the ingredients already inside, rather than purchasing new things.
What’s novel about Su-Chef is its promise of connecting to a larger database that allows the robot to make suggestions, identify possible alternatives, analyze and personalize flavor profiles, and reduce food waste—and perhaps ominously, to render some percentage of human labor-hours unnecessary. In between the meteoric rise of generative AI and our increasingly “smart” array of appliances (at least until they become bricked), it seems to me that we’re almost already there. The now-defunct Creator Burger, which offered burgers freshly prepared by a robot, and the more recent trend of robotic baristas demonstrate the potential crossover from industrial machines that sort, wash, cut, cook, and freeze foods into the fast-casual world.
Yet fine dining is a different beast. It relies on a culture in which the chef’s persona offers diners an intangible, yet sought-after “taste of fame” (as highlighted in the 2022 comedic horror film The Menu). Despite the capacity of people to fall in love with AI chatbots, it’s less clear whether a robot can ever generate the enchantment that comes with eating food prepared by a human artisan.
