A NYT food editor, Priya Krishna, asks AI to generate Thanksgiving recipes, then follows the recipes to the letter:
This was an interesting project, well presented, so just a few comments:
1. The human beings tasting the food knew how it was made, so their judgment was affected by how they feel about artificial intelligence: There's no emotion, no context.
2. The tasters all work in the NYT food department. They openly exult that the machines aren't going to take their jobs. In other words: They had an economic interest in rejecting the work of machines.
3. Nothing stops us from using the AI to generate a first draft of a recipe and then to use our own intuition in changing the recipe as we go along or to make it a second time with improvements. That would add a sense of context and backstory.
4. In the future, how we interacted with AI on the way to putting this dinner on the table may become story — and why wouldn't it take on context and emotion, just as much as if you'd followed a human-made recipe that you got from a cookbook or website? It's only the old family recipes that are fully, emotively contextualized.
5. A lot of those family recipes aren't all that good.
6. A lot of human emotion isn't that good. I think it's funny that people assume that the emotion people will bring to the project is about warmth and love and beauty. There's some bad emotion too, including the smugness about the goodness of your own recipes and the desire to force others to eat that stuff you made.
7. Please, ladies, tie back your long hair when you are leaning into the food!
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47 comments:
So like a Hallmark movie?
My emotion about Thanksgiving is that it's way overdone. Please let's just enjoy a meal together and get on with life.
I feed my dog this really awesome dog food called Freshpet.
You have to keep it in a refrigerator, because it's not stuffed full of preservatives. So it's refrigerated dog food, very high end, kind of expensive. You can find it in grocery stores because Freshpet has got a lot of fridges in grocery stores.
My dog loves this food. But the really funny thing is, people love it too.
5. A lot of those family recipes aren't all that good.
I think you hint here at something important—a lot of must have dishes are important because they were on the table when I was growing up. If they were good in their own right, I wouldn’t just eat them on Thanksgiving and Christmas. AI is only going to be as good as the inputs—they won’t come up with anything truly new and if a lot of the inputs aren’t very good, the outputs won’t be either.
Must almost every word be drawn out in, for lack of a better phrase, a sing-song manner? It's an annoying way of speaking for an adult.
Maybe it's intentional. Talk to the Times viewers as if you are talking to your children.
It seems to me that part of the point of Thanksgiving is that the recipes are boring. It's all about tradition, and tradition is not innovation.
And if you serve me kale on Thanksgiving I ain't eating it.
(My wife is a wonderful cook, and always makes some delicious innovations and improvements upon the boring meal. So in the highly unlikely chance that she is reading this, I've been hacked!!).
"Thanksgiving of the Future?"
According to our lefty/democratical/WEF/Davos"elite" "betters", it will all revolve around getting family together (as long as they live close by and public transport is available via wind-powered electric conveyances) in our 4 room concrete cubicle-homes stacked high one above each other Soviet Eastern-bloc "style", which we won't own naturally, and we will all have the privilege of sharing in our cricket-"turkey", cricket-"cranberry sauce", cricket-"stuffing" and cricket-"pumpkin pie".
Of course, under the "new rules", if anyone outside of our family "identifies" as our family member, they will be allowed to wander into our community owned "home" as they like and "select" from whatever we happen to have available, food or otherwise.
You understand comrade, don't you? Trust me, you'll want to answer "yes" to that question......
We have to reduce our standard of living to SAVE THE PLANET NOW!!! and so that the meals at Davos can remain as scrumptious as ever. After all, those private jet flights can really take it out of you after long vacations on your yachts in Greece or along the Riviera!
Emotions function to help you make decisions rapidly and based on probabilities/risk -- if fearful, angry, sad, disgusted, etc. you'll strongly resist or avoid certain paths. If happy you are happy with a given path. Be aware that negative emotions tend to be much stronger/memorable than positive emotions because they can have unwanted irreversible consequences.
The man says: "I got laid and then fell asleep."
The woman says: "I got laid and then missed my period."
@Althouse nails a lot of science here. For more see psychological heuristics (they call emotion 'affect'):
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-heuristic-2795235
So, the NYT is engaging in Thanksgiving Day mission creep. Just like Christmas, we have to start talking about the Holiday earlier and earlier every year.
Why is that? can the AI give me the answer?
And since I'm being a grump. I've seen more "Horserace" stuff this election year than ever before. And it started earlier than ever. I get the feeling the election is already over the winners have been declared.
And of course, after November 8th, we can start talking about the POTUS 2024 election, after all November 2024 is only 2 years away!
Our family Holiday recipes are pretty good. Maybe we just got lucky.
Except for the green beans. Which I still hate.
"When AI does Thanksgiving…"
What a strange idea.
Ampersand makes an excellent point at 1107.
I would only say that in being way overdone (good word choice) Thanksgiving is no different from other American holidays.
So, no blind comparative taste test?
If I made a BLT I would want the bacon a certain way, the tomatoes a certain width, a certain ratio of mayonnaise, no lettuce. At restaurants I try out every new BLT I see, or even standard ones, just to see what I might learn. Avocado? not a bad idea. Maple syrup, cayenne pepper, now you're getting silly. But here with AI I wouldn't be getting someone else's taste preferences but just a sort of average. So then, how would AI be better than a good solid cookbook? Or a magazine if you want to innovate.
my gramma made, The BEST chocolate chip cookies.. My sister and i just LOVED them.
When we got old enough to bake, my sister asked my gramma for her 'secret' recipe.
My gramma looked confused, and said: "It's RIGHT THERE, ON THE SIDE OF THE BAG OF CHIPS"
What recipe would an AI give you for toll house chocalate chip cookies? You KNOW it.
Great recipes are pretty straight foward, NONE of which stopped my gramma's cookies from tasting BEST
My mother-in-law makes parsnips every Thanksgiving, because she grew up with them and likes them. No one else in the family does. That's Thanksgiving for ya...
My little nuclear family is gathering this year, just the five of us, and I have decided to eschew reflexive following of Tradition and ask everyone what things they absolutely want to have that day. Our daughter has asked if it's too nuts to request Thanksgiving brownies; "Absolutely not, brownies it is," I said.
It's shaping up to be a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving at our house, and I look forward to seeing the final menu!
(I refuse to make anything for the Big 3 holidays from ingredients that originate in a can or box. I depart from the primary cooks on both sides of the family in this respect.)
I've fed my family cornbread and cornbread/sausage stuffing at Thanksgiving forever, because I like cornbread and have few opportunities to make it otherwise, being fat and on a perpetual attempt at dieting. I don't say the last part to my family, I just say the cornbread is "traditional" for me. And now after decades of doing so, it is to my family, also.
Of such small deceits are happy memories made.
My emotion about turkey is that it's way overdone.
There, fixed.
I like the idea of AI being able to search the web and distill down recipes for me. I like to cook, and most of the time when I am cooking something new or unfamiliar I will google recipes, read several of them, and then just wing it based on what I've learned from them. I rarely ever follow a recipe to the letter, but I am primarily looking to get the gist of what the technique is. If an AI could do that and present a generic recipe more efficiently, I would be all for it.
Wildswan, I am the same way about Reuben sammiches. Most I've ever had are disappointing, with bread soggy from the sauerkraut or from the Russian dressing. I still like the taste, but the experience of eating a badly made Reuben makes is like holding a baby with a full diaper - at any second something bad might happen.
At the Winter Park, CO, ski resort, I once watched the chef at Lunch Rock Restaurant make my Reuben, and the order of its assembly resulted in a sandwich with crisply toasted rye bread, despite loads of dressing, kraut and corned beef. Perfection.
A correctly made BLT has a ratio of >90% B, <10% L+T. And 0% is allowable under the "<10%" part of the ratio.
I'm a little surprised the post-mortem didn't consider the human-created prompt that generated the recipes. A better prompt could have yielded better results. How could she have improved the prompt? Those of us who end up interacting with this technology will need to learn how to give it input that results in better output.
"Nothing stops us from using the AI to generate a first draft of a recipe and then to use our own intuition in changing the recipe as we go along or to make it a second time with improvements."
Exactly. How is it much different from following any recipe? With a few exceptions, ALL recipes are just guidelines. Any real cook knows this.
Transinformational is not trending.
“Like Water for Chocolate” (1992) tells the reason why some recipes fail. Your heart and soul have to be in it. Like for instance, if her heart was in it, she would have added water to some of the recipes. Her entire body language, if you will, seemed forced and contrived. I realise I haven’t watched any other videos of this woman cooking, but that’s the vibe I got from her. Not the vibe of a cook.
I read the posts from the top down, so was expecting this to be about how Al (Weird Al) does Thanksgiving. The video was interesting, but not nearly as entertaining as I had expected.
All recipes may be just guidelines, but the worst meals I've had to endure were prepared by women who treated easy, basic recipes like onerous restrictions on their free spirits. The kind of person who starts the process before making sure all the ingrediments are available.
One of my flaws is that if I am invited to eat and given bad or poorly-prepared food, I hold a grudge.
My wife is a great cook when she tries, which is less and less often, alas.
Stuffing, like Reuben sandwhiches, needs to be done just right or the result can be a soggy mess or dried up disaster. Our "family tradition" is extremely simple well done stuffing. Celery, Sage, Onion, white bread, and the right amount of butter. Done in a separate dish, since putting it in the turkey can be the road to disaster.
Popped in the oven, and then taken out at just the right time.
Off-topic: one of my biggest beefs about Restraurants today is the inability to find good hashbrowns. Either microwaved, or too undercooked or overcooked. Well done hashbrowns made from fresh potatoes are a delight. Even my wife likes them, and she usually pefers rice.
That idea of being the face who used the weight and reach of the NYT to suggest that AI could replace the time-honored influence of a kitchen's chef probably scared her. So, she conducted a necessary experiment, if you will. Put that idea in its place; out of the kitchen.
God of the Sea People: Your technique is the same as mine. My other go-to is an ancient Fannie Farmer cookbook. Get the basics down and go from there.
Eventually we'll have the culinary equivalent of the Orgasmatron.
Not surprising that the NY Times did this experiment on Thanksgiving foods (devoid of "context," as Thanksgiving itself must be these days). Anything other than traditional American cooking would have led to accusations of cultural appropriation through science. Half the staff at "Bon Appetit" was let go for less.
As long as Blogger is not in charge of the turkey.
Two turkeys.
Three turkeys.
No turkeys.
Try again.
"AI" cooking would be a sexy thing for cub scouts or the middle school science fair. Yet would not win first place. AI is poorly defined.
rcocean: I learned the secret to fabulous hash downs from a small diner named “Mom’s” somewhere in Oregon (though the owner was from Wisconsin). She grates all her potatoes the night before and soaks them in milk in a 5 gallon bucket. In the morning they squeeze the potatoes in cheesecloth to get rid of all the milk. They are then ready to fry up. Best hash downs ever!
Thanksgiving hasn't been a big thing for me since I left home for school a thousand miles away at age 17 in 1971. Couldn't afford to go home for Thanksgiving back then, particularly twice within a month or so (I did go home for Christmas). By the time I could afford to go home, I was out of the practice. Since then, I have only had a single family Thanksgiving, purely by accident, in 1979 or 1980.
Freshman year at the dining hall alone was the worst; I think there was only one other guy that I didn't know in my 40+ person dorm that weekend. After that, I had communal Thanksgivings with the other left-behinds at school, either cooking on our own or eating (and, after we became legal in 1973. drinking!) at the dining hall together. A handful of communal things since then, but it's mostly been a me-day. In the old days, I used to go to the movies in the afternoon. Then cook some special things for myself, which I still do, sometimes in Boston, sometimes in New Hampshire.
[My first post got rejected, apparently for length, so to be continued . . . ]
--gpm
Continued for those breathlessly awaiting:
OTOH, Christmas dinner in our family has always been more or less identical to Thanksgiving dinner. Starting a couple of years after my parents moved out of their house on the South Side after the neighborhood "changed," as they say in Chicago (the actual story is a bit more complicated, since my father was originally adamant that they weren't moving from the house they'd owned for more than twenty-five years), one of my sisters did Christmas every year for some 45 years starting in the mid-70s, with attendance usually in the 50s or 60s in her not that large of a house. Her daughter, who had been hosting Christmas Eve for the much smaller inner circle for ten years or so, was supposed to take over last year, but she tested positive for Covid on Christmas Eve, resulting in a cancellation of the Christmas Eve event and her sister taking over on Christmas at the last minute for a much smaller group. The Thanksgiving hosts were more varied, so the dimmers may have varied a bit more, with probably considerably smaller attendance.
Coming back closer to the point of this post, there is one family dish that always has to be there, in addition to the turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, bread dressing, black olives, and, more recently baked ham. We call it scurley, which is an Americanization (both in spelling and in recipe) from an actual Scottish dish that my German-background mother must have learned to make from her mother-in-law. As we know it, it's another turkey stuffing cooked in the rear opening of the turkey made up primarily of ground oatmeal (we as kids had to do the hand grinding of the oatmeal a day or so in advance). On its own, it's sorta like eating sand, but it's improved by a heavy overlay of turkey gravy. My Scottish-background father and my priestly brother loved (and the brother still loves) the stuff. Almost everyone else hates it. I was originally one of the haters but have come around to liking it a bit, at least in moderation.
--gpm
And the grand finale:
The other (Scottish; "if it's nae Scottish, it's c-r-r-r-a-p-p") family dish is the neeps. Turnips (maybe really rutabagas) that are boiled to death, stinking up the whole house where they are cooked. Again, almost everybody hates them, but it's our heritage! When I do it for myself, I cook the much milder, sweeter, little white ones with the purple tops along with the potatoes, which I don't bother to mash (or sometimes don't bother to peel).
Don't get me started on the desserts. I've always been a big (anything other than pumpkin) pie fan, particularly cherry pie, as my mother well knew, but they've largely moved away from pies. Another largely abandoned tradition is apple slices, which are a big, thin, rectangular sort of apple pie with a bit of a powdered sugar glaze. Now it's a lot of mostly vile cookies, though another sister may honor our Scottish heritage by making some passable shortbread.
There are usually so many people coming and going that anyone in the vicinity of the far southwest suburbs of Chicago could stop by for a late afternoon dinner on Christmas.
Late in the evening and into the early morning, after most of the attendees have gone, what's left is a small portion of the inner group. Mostly a few of my sisters, maybe an in-law or a niece or nephew or two, and me. That's when the knives come out. Anybody not there is grist for vicious back-stabbing and gossip. Maybe I'm a candidate at Thanksgiving but, still living a thousand miles away, they don't have much dirt on me.
So, those are some of our wonderful holiday traditions.
--gpm
Priya Krishna is the queen of quickie Dal and Chhonk -- a simple Indian recipe I make at least twice a month. Trust me.
The other (Scottish; "if it's nae Scottish, it's c-r-r-r-a-p-p") family dish is the neeps. Turnips (maybe really rutabagas) that are boiled to death, stinking up the whole house where they are cooked. Again, almost everybody hates them, but it's our heritage!
When I was in Savannah I ran into a tiny old man who was from Scotland. And I wanted to speak to our common heritage, so I said, "That's cool, I'm Scotch-Irish." Unfortunately it sent him into an absolute rage. "I'm a Scot! I'm not a fookin' drink!" There was a lot more than two sentences, those are just the ones I remember. I think he spewed a couple of paragraphs of rage. He was a little old man, too. It was like I had pissed off Yosemite Sam. I'm not sure if he actually jumped up and down but I kind of remember it that way.
What I could have said was, "I didn't call you Scotch-Irish, you old world hothead, I called myself Scotch-Irish, which I think I'm allowed to do! Holy shit." But I didn't say any of that. Because I'm polite in face-to-face confrontations with old men half my size.
Anyway, I feel like I'm 30% Scot (I don't want to have a bad dream about that little fucker), 30% Irish, 50% English, and 100% free will. And if you're complaining about my math, I think that's the Irish part of me. Which I'm allowed to say, damn it, cause it's me!
I got no Thanksgiving stories, sorry, I fall asleep on the couch.
We try to avoid political discussions because our family is filled with political out-breeding. If that's a word.
Just today I suggested to my mom that instead of biting our tongues and trying to avoid politics, maybe we could practice respectful listening. You know, somebody rants and the rest of us respectfully listen. And then we rotate. And she rolled her eyes at me like my idea would never fucking work. (It totally would never fucking work). So we're going to try to bite our tongues again and see how that goes.
I'm going to practice not smiling or gloating or cackling with evil glee. I can do that much. And I'm pretty good about not grabbing the remote and switching MSNBC to anything, fucking anything. I'll just walk the dog for a few miles and maybe drive away or something. Already I'm getting warnings like I start this shit. I'm a peace-maker! Come on!
My brother and my mother are having a blue state scuffle, which is totally new. You'd have to imagine Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi mad at each other. Anyway, I don't have any stories, just fears and hopes and dreams.
Turkey and gravy, dressing, and stuffing, with mashed potatoes and pie. I sort of assume everybody eats what we eat, but then I heard a Scottish horror story, so now my assumptions are up in smoke.
But are the AI's recipes racist?
That's the important question.
Just my opinion but you really shouldn't need a recipe to cook *food* (meat, potatoes, vegetables) unless it's a totally unfamiliar item, and even then it's mostly about technique, not ingredients. Season well and cook to the desired doneness by whatever method suits your fancy.
Baked goods are a whole 'nother matter, however.
Some interesting comments on this thread. A few idiosyncratic observations:
There are few meals worse than ill-prepared Thanksgiving food; dry turkey, bitter parsnips, stuffing made of (ack!) cornbread, etc.
It may be declasse, but box stuffing like Stovetop - and I agree it should never see the cavity of a turkey - is better than almost all homemade stuffing I've been served in my life. I grew up in a family where it was called "dressing", not stuffing.
It is indeed extraordinarily difficult to find a proper Reuben sandwich in a restaurant. Like many things in life, more is not always better. Who wants to try to eat a sandwich stacked so high that you can't get it into your mouth? Similarly with burgers; I never order a hamburger in a restaurant where the menu picture shows it stacked higher than a couple of inches, including the bun.
This will be my 30th year of frying turkey for Thanksgiving. Once you learn how and the little tricks of it, it's easier than baking and much quicker. I usually do two small turkeys (12-14 pounders, which seem to do better with frying) and a duck.
Tricky to be a food writer for the Times at Thanksgiving. You write about good food, but the official line is to "problematize" the holiday. And even the food writers blather on about politics now. This week, another food piece was about how pecan tarts are a gay thing.
The point of the video was to denigrate Thanksgiving. They turned it into a horror film science project and snickered over the disastrous corpse.
Is there a name for the way she talks? I can't get 5 seconds into this video without cringing.
Y'all making me hungry.
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