Kantos Kan led me to one of these gorgeous eating places where we were served entirely by mechanical apparatus. No hand touched the food from the time it entered the building in its raw state until it emerged hot and delicious upon the tables before the guests, in response to the touching of tiny buttons to indicate their desires.—Edgar Rice Burroughs, “A Princess of Mars” (1912)

By now, robots who can cook are nothing new. Most of them are basically one trick ponies (at least culinarily): a Swiss robot that was taught to make omelets to demonstrate its abilities, Japanese robots that can grill okonomayaki or make octopus balls from scratch.There’s even a restaurant called Famen in Nagoya staffed by two robots who act out a comic routine and spar with knives in between preparing bowls of ramen. However, the cooking robot recently introduced by two Chinese unversities that’s making the rounds online this month comes closer to the fantasy in the Burroughs story of something that can produce a huge variety of foods on demand, almost like replicators on Star Trek. This new cooking robot can make 300 different dishes based on the offerings of four top chefs in Jiangsu Province and may soon be able to produce up to 600.

What strikes me about the media coverage of cooking robots is the paradox that, on the one hand, the fact that they can do something so essentially human is a substantial part of the delight they inspire. Their food-related activities are often designed to soften peoples’ resistance to robots—for example, researchers at Carnegie Mellon developed the Snackbot that they introduced to a reporter for the New York Times last month to “gather information on how robots interact with people (and how to improve homo-robo relations).” But on the other hand, the essential humanness of cooking can also make the robots especially unnerving. In fact, the more human, the more they seem to bother people. The Engadget article on the sushi-grabbing hand, “Chef Robot makes its video debut, nightmares forthcoming,” seems mostly disturbed by how “realistic” the hand looks:

In case you missed it, the robot itself is actually just a standard issue FANUC M-430iA robot arm with a way too realistic hand attached to it, which apparently not only helps it prepare sushi, but some tasty desserts as well. Head on past the break for the must-see video, you've nothing to lose but your ability to unsee it.

Though usually slightly less dramatic, most other articles I’ve seen about cooking robots end with some sort of joke or disclaimer, which usually reflect anxieties about the threat that cooking robots pose to the boundary between human and machine.

If this thing ever gets imported to the U.S., it would need to make fortune cookies too. But what would a robot fortune say?—CNet (on the 300-dish Chinese cook)

More than 200 diners have enjoyed the machine's cuisine thus far, and reportedly taste testers have found the food to be on par with a traditional restaurant kitchen, flavor-wise. (No mention has been made of the robot's plating abilities.)—CNet (on a prototype developed by a retired professor using an induction burner and robotic arm)

While it lacks the personal touch and the ability to hold some small banter with regular guests, at least you can be sure the fingers have not gone around digging noses or scratching butts.”—Ubergizmo (on the sushi hand)

“No matter how skilled Motoman is, I doubt real chefs like Anthony Bourdain or Mario Batali would be caught dead cooking next to him.” Robot Living (referring to Chef Motoman, who was designed to work alongside humans in a restaurant environment)

A seemingly irrepressible impulse to name something robots can’t infringe on, like speculating about the future or making the kind of aesthetic and creative decisions that go into plating, or find some other way to distinguish them from human chefs—the ability to banter or pick their nose or smoke and hate on vegans or compete in elaborate cooking competitions. Even the NYTimes article, which focuses mostly on how food “humanizes” robots, ends by erecting a wall based on the ability to taste:

The real obstacle to a world full of mechanized sous-chefs and simulated rage-filled robo-Gordon Ramsays may be something much harder to fake: none of these robots can taste.

Keizo Shimamoto, who writes a blog on ramen noodles and has eaten at Famen, the two-robot Japanese restaurant, said that the establishment was “kind of dead” when he ate there last year. Though the owner said that people do taste the food, according to Mr. Shimamoto, “It was a little disappointing.” It’s one thing to get people to stop by to see the robots. “But to keep the customers coming back,” he said, “you need better soup.”

And while it’s true that none of the robots mentioned in the article can taste, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other robots that can. Read more

Every time I eat a whole, fresh artichoke I wonder two things:

1) Who was the first person to take the time to figure out that if you cook this giant thistle bud and then remove all the stuff that’s still completely inedible, at the very center, there are a few ounces—not more than a few bites worth—of flesh that’s not just edible, but really tasty? (which frequently leads to questions 1a: how hungry would you have to be? and 1b: what else might that person have attempted to cook and eat?) and

2) How often do artichokes inspire that question? Like, in what percentage of instances where globe artichokes are prepared and consumed with at least some of their inedible parts intact do they cause people to wonder about their origins? Is it over 50%? Could it be as high as 70%? How many times, over how many different artichokes, has some version of the same conversation about the wonder and mystery of the artichoke’s discovery taken place?

Neither of which are answerable. The most we can know about the first person (or persons) who ate artichokes is that they probably lived in North Africa, where the giant thistles are still found in their wild form and where they acquired the Arabic name “al kharshuf,” which all the European names were derived from. But despite years and years of artichoke eating, I had never bothered to even find out that much because it’s not really a need to know kind of wonder that artichokes inspire. It’s more that they activate a sense of awe. Wonderment, I guess.

I mean, how weird and wonderful is it that this thorny armadillo of a vegetable exists? That there’s just a tiny piece of edible flesh clinging to each of the tough, pointy leaves and once you remove all of them and the bristly “choke,” you uncover this amazing savory-sweet heart that tastes completely unlike anything else in the world (except, apparently, the related cardoon I’ve never encountered)? If you read about it in a poem, you’d probably think it was a totally clumsy, ham-handed metaphor, too obvious by half. How literally incredible that some plant just happened to evolve that way.

Nonetheless, I decided to put question #1 to one of those crazy new services that charge you a fee to google shit for you, you lazy git text you answers to random questions. I asked kgb “Who was the first person to eat an artichoke?” at 5:57 pm. Here’s the exchange that followed:

From 542542

Thanks and sit tight. kgb is researching your answer & will send it shortly ($.99/answer). Msg&Data rates may apply. Reply HELP for help or STOP to cancel.

Received: Mon Feb 15, 5:58 pm

From 542542

Thanks for using kgb_Do you have any questions for us? We would love to answer it. Ask us! 24/7. No charge. kgb_team

Received: Mon Feb 15, 5:59 pm

To 542542

Never received answer to question: who was the first person to eat an artichoke?

Sent: Mon Feb 15, 6:02 pm

From 542542

Sorry for the delay. Pliny the Elder observed in 77 A.D. that Romans consumed artichokes. The name of the person to try it is unknown. No charge for this one.

Received: Mon Feb 15, 6:10 pm

So at least they don’t charge you if they can’t answer, and apologize if they get a non-answer to you in less time than it would take a sumo wrestler to stomp your ass. (I suppose that’s non-endorsing with faint praise?) ChaCha, “ur mobile BFF,” also basically threw in the towel:

The origin of artichokes is unknown, they are said to have come from the Maghreb (North Africa), so who knows who ate one first! Link

That “so” weirdly implies a causal connection between the fact that they’re from North Africa and the fact that no one knows who ate one first which seems a bit “Maghreb, land of mystery about which no historical facts can be ascertained!” If they were said to come from Sweden, would that also explain why we don’t know who ate one first? Another of our BFFs at ChaCha borrows a line from Greek mythology:

Cynara was a woman whom Zeus fell in love with and she betrayed him and he turned her into an artichoke because she ate them. Link

The myth of Cynara actually has a neat legacy in the names of one of the molecules that give artichokes their unique capacity for taste perversion—cynarin, which I’ll be writing more about in the next artichoke entry—and the liqueur made from artichokes—Cynar. But it doesn’t get us any closer to an answer to the questions.

I think a lot of what makes artichokes so intriguing is the fact that you have to be taught how to eat them, or initiated into what seems like a secret order of artichoke eaters. They’re complicated and fussy, the vegetal antithesis of the apple, whose starring role in so many sacred and secular stories seems fundamentally tied to how easy and natural the act of biting into a raw apple is. Surely Eve could have withstood the temptations of an artichoke. Surely Snow White would have figured out her disguised stepmother was up to no good by the time she was done with all that cleaning and trimming and cooking. You simply could not stumble on an artichoke in the wild and intuit how to consume it. And that’s not just because it has to be cooked: how much easier is it to figure out what to do with a potato or a winter squash?

My mom was the one who taught me how to prepare and eat artichokes. On the rare occasions when they happened to be on sale at the grocery store, she would buy just one. We never ate them with or in a meal, always by themselves, often on the same day that we had gone shopping. I never saw other people eating them—not at restaurants or on television or at friends’ houses. I don’t even remember ever seeing my dad eat one. So artichokes always seemed like this special secret vegetable that only my mom knew what to do with.

However, wikipedia claims that what she always did with them: cut off the stem and the top, trim the leaves, steam until tender, and eat with butter is the way they are “most frequently prepared” in the U.S. I kind of doubt that in terms of the total volume of artichoke consumed; most artichokes eaten in America are probably consumed in the form of a creamy dip with a 90% chance of including spinach. But that kind of dip is almost always made with artichokes that have been frozen or preserved in brine, even by home cooks and Alton Brown. If you’ve ever had fresh artichoke, you already know why: they are one of the great exceptions to the general rule that everything savory is better with cheese and/or garlic. Fresh artichokes are so good by themselves, all you really need to do is steam them and eat them. So this won’t seem like much of a recipe, but in case your mom never showed you how, instructions and pictures after the jump: Read more