I recently went to Camberwell’s Silk Road restaurant, with my beloved, for a meal. All seemed normal as conversations clattered off the hard walls. We chose some cabbage, sliced pork and lamb noodles then began to unwind. When the food arrived, it seemed a little out of sorts. Something wasn’t quite the same as before. Had we strayed too far from our cul-de-sac of familiar dishes? Were we just really hungry the many other times we came here?
My fellow diner made The Big Discovery, as I was busy introducing myself to the lamb shish noodles. Our table was across from the pass, giving us a sneak peak into the kitchen, through which they spotted an unfamiliar food prep machine... a Chefeon Commercial Cooking Robot.
A pulley system intermittently dropped portions of chopped ingredients into a spinning sphere closely followed by a stream of sauces. Automated stir frying behind a tinted screen, complete with front-of-house order-status-tracking iPad interface. By the time the resulting dish was on its way out to the table, the machine had washed itself and was onto the next order. A star graduate from The Wallace And Gromit School Of The Culinary Arts has hit the scene here in South London.
Asking for a raise so i can get a Chefeon for the flat.
So, at what point on the spectrum of mechanically-aided food prep / serving do we go from mod con to ick?
In Holland you can self-serve brown, crispy mystery food from a FEBO automat, or in Japan order a whole customised meal without having to talk to anyone. I did a two-year stint in a milkshake shop, with the help of a couple Blendtec blenders. Honourable mention to their marketing team who were insanely early to the Anti Smartphone wave back in 2007.
The Big Spinning Contraption made food which was like eating a familiar version of, but not quite the real thing. It’s what my friend Jean Baudrillard might have called a Simulacrum. The sauce was a little gloopier, the slices a little too rhythmic and the whole thing felt averaged out. Autocomplete as food.
Ultimately the Chefeon cooked up an involuntary Automation Anxiety, the bitter side dish to the technology du jour that is Artificial Intelligence. Despite a canon of cautionary tales, we are speeding into an increasingly automated future both physically and mentally. Optimistic voices envisage a world where we are freed from the drudgery of our Boring Degrading Job and have way more time to Do Whatever We Want.
Trying to imagine a tech-enabled utopian future, in which someone just so happens to make hundreds of billions of dollars at the same time, is the defining feature of the Californian Ideology. By subordinating some work to automated tools, we can find little more time for ourselves. However, a radical societal shift will be needed if we want to spend our days going Nonna Mode and making Slow Food all day in a work-lite future.
Me in a fully automated universal high income Microsoft Teams free future.
It's nice to be around people in a restaurant and marvel at the cooking ability of the chefs. Of course, in order to fully enjoy oneself, a few table changes are needed to avoid the more annoying members of the General Dining Public. Taking mental notes on flavours and combinations to try at home and engaging with foods of the world is one the core joys of living in a city. From the diner’s side, a robot cooker feels like an unwelcome technological encroachment into the third space. Perhaps even, if hangry, a slight on the human indulgence project.
Zooming out a little, it’s clear that Food is having a moment. The Girl Dinner and Hot Rat Summer were the canary in the LVMH-buying-30%-of-dishoom coal mine. In the mid 2020s cost-of-living-crisis, experience-first world, dining out is now the go-to status-signalling activity. What happens when creation of the food itself is subject to the speed and logic of AI, in the same way the pic of your plate does when it is beamed up to social media feed algorithms? We see a bit of this with aesthetic food trends.
“These were the most aesthetic croissants on the list”
In the era of extreme Niche-ification, this could go way way further. Imagine a Chefeon future, where the machine has access to all your data points: your busy calendar, food intake for the day, cortisol level, etc and so on. The machine feeds (lol) all of this info into an AI system trained on all the cookbooks ever to exist. Processing the required AI matrix multiplications on an onboard GPU, the heat sink from which warms the plate rack, it then computes and cooks the Perfect Dish For You Right Now. The Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy come true. Fancy a bite?
Back to the room and I’m wondering about the opinions on automation in the minds beyond the pass. In the same way I make use of tools to automate and speed up tasks in my working life, kitchen staff are, of course, going to have the same desire to make their lives easier too. Perhaps the Chefeon signals a shared desire of not really wanting to have to work, even if your work is what others may see as something they quite like doing for fun.
So what is the charge for the crime of a robot-prepared Chinese meal? It’s automation manifest! And it’s ended up on my plate. I am planning to go back to Silk Road to ask after the Chefeon and get some more insights into the robochef and what it signals for the future.
In the meantime, I’ll cook for her at home.