Comment by epsteingpt

4 hours ago

The work is very interesting. The title is misleading.

A better title would be: "all of human ingredients compressed into 1,800 primitives"

There is little to substantively nothing about the actual cooking: preparation methods, proportions, etc.

But the idea that tomato goes well with beef the whole world over is very interesting and useful for creating flavors that will go together, perhaps surprisingly. It will be a nice resource in the future.

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epsteingpt

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fps-hero  3 hours ago

I have a wonderful book that explores this idea of an atlas of flavours that work together.

The flavor bible.

I can assure you that it does not contain 1800 ingredients in all of there combinations, but it does a remarkable job of covering a widely used selection of herbs spices vegetables and meats. I doubt a compressed version of the text would even be very large.

The trouble I find with LLM generated recipes is they miss the nuance of the technique. Often the success of a depends on a single step or ratio. For instance “fried chicken” has a million incarnations the world over, but you can’t just average out the recipes and end up with tasty fried chicken.

niek_pas  1 hour ago

Unless I'm missing something, there's also nothing in the paper to indicate this is "all of human ingredients"? It looks like it's 11 data sources covering a bunch of common cuisines, with the English + Chinese sources accounting for 90% (!) of the dataset. Among others, Africa and the Arab world are not present in the data (good for about 25% of the global population).

Also, all non-English terms were AI-translated to English which is methodologically understandable but surely leaves room for error.

  • order-matters  44 minutes ago

    translation is an interesting problem in and of itself still. its kind of a miracle we can do it at all, yet in some circumstances it seems obvious for there to be objective answers (cooking ingredients being one of them), but even then you never really know even with human translators if you've got it correct. even within the same language nearly every individual has their own version of it.

    for example, how would you translate "chips" to another language without first knowing which version of English you are translating from? could be an american speaker with a british relative and they use the british definition of chips while otherwise mostly speaking american english.

    there's a level of pragmatism in translation that needs to be assumed, and ultimately we have to accept that translated knowledge will always have low resolution. There is a layer of work that needs to be done with the source of the materials involvement to get written content to a level of formalism needed to be representative of the language it is written in. Generally, the work of editors. Which means successful translation for wide distribution, while still not guaranteed, is predicated on the editorial skills of the translator which begs for dialogue with the source.

    Meanwhile, AI provides this super convenient band aid to get translation results you can't disprove.

    I genuinely think people are severely underestimating the power held by these models for being translators and how literal truth is going to be determined by them deep behind the scenes under the disguise of accessibility. Not in a dangerous way necessarily, just in a way where what languages are and what words mean is going to shift towards whatever the models think they are.

    In a way, over extended time, the models will not be wrong about the translations because their results will redefine what successful formal editing of language looks like, and disagreeing with them will amount to the same difference as having local slang.

Tade0  3 hours ago

> But the idea that tomato goes well with beef the whole world over is very interesting

I saved a beef stew I was making for twelve people once by adding tomato sauce.

Beef hardens if stewed incorrectly and tomato acid tenderises it again.

EDIT: removed incorrect information about store bought tomatoes.

Bengalilol  2 hours ago

+1.

On a side note (and maybe off topic), I am thinking about food pairing which is based on the idea that two ingredients sharing volatile aroma compounds or certain molecular families may have a potential sensory compatibility (broccolis and strawberries for example). I'd love to test those ingredients and find some unknown food pairings. But .. time is what it is (for now).

  • dheera  1 hour ago

    I think it's a lot simpler than that. A common pattern for sauces is fat + acid + salt

    - (Mexican) avocado and lime/lemon + salt

    - (Chinese-southwestern) chili oil and vinegar + salt/fermented bean paste

    - (Italian) olive oil and tomato + salt

    - (Turkish) olive oil and lemon + salt

    - (Thai) coconut milk and lime + salt

    ...