Borg Chef, Part II

Are robots poised to take over the kitchen? We look at the opportunities and challenges in the future of kitchen automation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, yummy, yummy, yummy.
I got love in my tummy. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm

(00:22):
Lauren Bam, and I'm Joe McCormick. I thought you were
going to do there's a party in my tummy. No,
I don't know that one. Nobody knows this. There's a
party in my tummy. Yummy, yummy, yummy, yummy. No, No,
I I have no no clue what you're going on about.
We must move on. Today. We're gonna talk about robots

(00:43):
and cooking more because we did this before, right, We
did this back in August two fifteen. We did an
episode called The Borg Chef, and in that we talked
about AI, we talked about robots, we talked about a
couple of different approaches people were thinking about. But there's
been more since then that I thought would be fun
to kind of revisit and talk about, maybe even get

(01:03):
a little debate going about the value of a robot
in the place of a chef or um, you know,
is the is there enough value to uh to to
combat the cost of these um doesn't make sense. So
let's talk a little bit, uh backtrack a bit. Well,

(01:24):
we've we mentioned in the previous episode that kitchen automation
is one of those things that's been going on for decades. Uh,
from everything from pretty simple stuff dishwashers toasters, uh, you know,
electric can openers up to digital ovens where you can
program things so that they preheed at a certain time,
that kind of stuff. And then there are all those

(01:45):
very specific little appliances you know, the bread and machine
stuff like. Yeah, a lot of stuff where we have
tried very hard to make it easier, less time consuming,
less labor intensive. Right, anything we can do to make
make the process of cooking more accessible and and less

(02:06):
of a requirement on our energy and time. UM. That's
been the case for for decades, but we are really
seeing a push for that to go into overdrive, particularly
with home automation and robotics being the two big areas. Also,
I would argue apps play a big part in that too,

(02:27):
being incorporated into every device you can imagine at this point,
like refrigerators and stoves and that kind of stuff. I
also think some of this demand is simply based on
people not understanding how bad robots are it cooking. Yeah,
I can see that. Well. I mean, I think part
of it is just, you know, all it takes is
that one day where you've had a really hard day

(02:49):
at work and it took forever to get home because
traffic is terrible, and you walk through the door and
you're hungry, but you have no energy left, and you're thinking,
what am I going to do? I don't want to
go out, I don't want to order food. If only
I had a robo chef, I could just push a
button and say, you know, make me fedacchini alfredo or

(03:11):
something along those lines, and it would just do it
for you. Wouldn't that be lovely? Wouldn't that be awesome?
And the problem is that, yeah, that would be awesome,
But we're not there yet. We're not at a point
where where robo chef can jump in and take over. Um.
But well not if you care about it being cost
effective and good. Right, if you wanted to be expensive

(03:33):
and bad, we got you covered. But uh yeah. And
one of the reasons why I wanted to bring this
up as I had read a book review in Popular
Science as a book review for the book Unnaturally Delicious,
written by Jason Lusk, and Lusk is a professor of
agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University. Now, this this book

(03:54):
actually covers a ton of different stuff, not just robotics
in the kitchen. That was some of the apparent only
the early chapters had some of that. A lot of
it had things to do with like genetically modified organisms
that kind of stuff. Um and uh, and I don't
actually agree with all of Lusk's points on everything that
that he argued, but the robot stuff was kind of fun.

(04:16):
He talks about going to a restaurant with his wife
and they were it was actually one of Bobby Flay's restaurants,
and uh, ordering an appetizer, and they loved the appetizers
so much that they bought the cookbook for the restaurant
at which included the recipe for the the appetizer they loved.
Then they went back home and they tried to make
the appetizer. And first off, he said, the amount of

(04:39):
time that it suggested it would take to make the
appetizer was orders of magnitude off, Like, it was way
less time than what actually took. Sure, I'll save my
comments for the end of the story, okay uh, and
then he says, well, then we go through. We follow
the instructions, were done with everything, but I just wasn't

(04:59):
the same. It wasn't as good as when we went
into the restaurant and had it there. It was something
was missing, and they weren't sure if they messed up
something with the recipe, if maybe they left something cooking
too long or didn't cook it long enough. There was
no way for them to really know short of retracing
every step they had taken up through preparing that appetizer.

(05:22):
So he said, what if we were able to have
a robot UH that could prepare a dish exactly the
way a chef prepares it. So the robot uses machine
learning to study the way a chef prepares a dish
and can, without fail, replicate that same sequence to the
point where it's using the the perfect temperature, it's using

(05:44):
the perfect motion to uh to fold ingredients together or
stir them or whisk them or whatever, so that you
would have consistent results every single time. That was that
was the dream. So you'd have a not just a
robot chef, but SpeI typically a robot Bobby flay. Yeah, uh,

(06:05):
that sounds terrifying. But but okay, my my other whole, my,
I just wanted to put a tiny caveat into this
story here that you know, it's it's assuming, it's assuming
a lot of things about a recipe to to say
that a robot chef would be able to duplicate a
recipe perfectly. And you know, if if if it's if

(06:25):
it's using machine learning to to watch a chef and
repeat steps back, then then that's a thing. But if
it's it's reading off of a recipe, then there's there's
many many things that can go wrong, mostly the human
error in writing recipes, which I suspect is what was
the problem. It could very easily have been that someone
had put in the wrong measurement for something or left

(06:47):
an ingredient out entirely sure, but I mean you also
have to assume that the atmosphere conditions in your house
are comparable to those of the chef's kitchen, that your
appliance as an equipment are precise and nonreactive. Is in
you're not having a reaction between like aluminum and lemon juice,
which is a thing that happens all I'm trying to say,
here is that cooking and especially baking our our edible chemistry,

(07:09):
and there are so many things that can go awry. Sure,
I mean, the first thing that occurred to me when
you said that they went home and they made it
and it wasn't the same was, well, did they get
their ingredients from the same place? Because I imagine the
ingredients they bought were probably not as good as the
ingredients that were bought by this restaurant. It's quite possible
did they weigh them or measure them? Yeah? So if

(07:33):
if your weight isn't a measurement, you guys know, if
you're able to if you're right, if they buy volume
or weight? Uh. If if in fact, they were following
it as closely as they possibly could with the ingredients
that were as close to the same quality as the restaurant,
there still could be other factors at play, like Lauren
is saying, that could affect this. Now, if you had
a robot, it may very well be that the robot

(07:56):
making the recipe would also come up with something that
does not taste as good is what they had at
the restaurant. I would argue, however, the robot would be
more likely to consistently make it not as good as
the restaurant, because that's what robots do, right. Robots are
really good at repeating steps that they have been programmed
to do, or, in the case of machine learning, taught

(08:18):
how to do, assuming the starting conditions are the same.
Another thing that's difficult with cooking, Yes, obviously if you
are one of the things we pointed out in our
previous episode. One of the specific robots we talked about
was Moley. That's the kitchen that has the two arms
coming down from like the kitchen hood, the oven hood. Oh,
it's beautiful. And you pointed out, Joe in that episode

(08:41):
that something as simple as replacing the extra virgin olive
oil with arsenic would create an entirely different dinner party
than the one you had intended, right, because it doesn't
know what the ingredients it's using are. It's it's spatial programming,
so it says, okay, X ingredient goes here, x y
ingredient goes here, So it doesn't actually know that this

(09:02):
dish contains olive oil, balslamic vinegar or whatever. It knows
that it contains slot number one and slot number four. Yeah,
almost every single kitchen robot i've ever seen uses different
shaped containers to represent an order of operations, right like,
at this stage of cooking, add whatever is in the

(09:24):
square yellow container. At this next step, add whatever in
the cylindrical red container, and that way, the robot knows
this is the order I follow. But the robot does
not know what is actually in those containers, what it means,
or why it's ordered putting them in this order. It
just learned how to do it in this way, So

(09:44):
it's essentially aping what someone else is doing. It's not
it's not learning in the sense of you understanding what
the process is. So when we humans learn, it's very different,
right We We first might learn just through route, right,
but then we start to understand why it's working the
way it's working. That's the level of understanding that goes
much deeper than just parroting what someone else has already done.

(10:09):
So that's already a limitation, but again, at least you
would get consistency, which is something I can never attest
like I can never I can never be sure that
something I'm cooking one time is going to come out
even remotely similar another time, because most of the stuff
I cook it's by feel. I'm not doing following specific recipes. Though,

(10:31):
for those of you listening at home, you want to
know what's the easiest way to make my cooking more consistent?
There is one way I can recommend, use a digital thermometer.
Use a digital thermometer on everything, and you get way
more consistent. That's true. Yeah, and uh, your oven is
probably lying to you. The other thing I would point
out is that while Lusk says, wouldn't this be wonderful?

(10:54):
You could have a robot chef make you the perfect
dish every time, part of me thinks, well, that also
takes out the opportunity to improvise and to tweak and
to experiment, where you might end up finding that by
departing from this approach that you love, I mean you
love the finished dish, you create something even better. Right,

(11:16):
you take innovation out. Now you would have to incorporate
something like IBM chef Watson to bring it back in.
But then who knows what you would end up with? Yeah, well,
I mean this comes up to a distinction I would make. Now,
some culinary people might uh not like me using the
terms these this way, but here's what I would say
that the difference between a cook and a chef. A
cook knows what to do in the kitchen. A chef

(11:39):
knows why you do what you do. I would agree
with that that definition understand so he or she would
understand all of the science behind why meat should be
cooked to a certain temperature or on a certain type
of appliance, or with why a certain flavor goes with
another flavor right or or at the very least, A

(11:59):
chef has has room to play due to their profession.
Uh And and a cook is following orders, probably to
to to get a thing out to a person to
a certain degree of quality that has been determined by
the chef. The chef is the person who creates the dish.
The cook is the person who replicates the dish. I

(12:20):
would argue, Um, and in some cases we play chef,
or we may play cook. But you know, there are
some people who are very much more in one camp
than the other. I would argue, I'm more of a
cook definitely. Um. I've tweaked recipes, but that's about as
far as I've gone. I've never invented one. So the Telegraph,
by the way, also references the moley. This this armed kitchen,

(12:42):
as in a kitchen that has arms, not a kitchen
that has weapons. In an article about ten ways humans
are still superior to robots, which is not an endorsement
in the Moley's abilities, I would argue, Uh, that says
the robot has really only been shown to master the
art of making crabbisk, which is specifically what we were
talking about last Yeah, uh and on Yeah, making crab bisk.

(13:04):
It's great at making crab bisks. So if you think
crab bisk is worth paying fifty thousand pounds sterling to
get a robot that can really make crab misk, have
we got the robot for you? What's what's that like?
Like something something like that. Yeah, I didn't do the conversion,
but you have fifty pounds sterling. Is is quite a
bit of money. That's very expensive bisk. Those crabs were

(13:26):
living in the lap of luxury before you plucked about
the ocean, I assume. But just think about the scenario
you described at the beginning. You come home tired and
you don't have the energy to make dinner, But gosh
darn it, you can have crab bisk again like you
did every other night. Joe, please let's not talk about
me having crab. We'll get into that a little later. Yes, yes,

(13:47):
so well uh so so so moley is is not
necessarily at the top of its game yet. Yeah, it's not.
It's not out. It's not available for consumer purchases or
commercial purchase. It's really going to be more a commercial
thing than a consume more things. But it is. It
is still targeted for release by That was according to
the Telegraph article, which was published in December, so not

(14:08):
that long ago. So unless something is remarkably changed, ye is,
when the company hopes to release this or unleash it
upon the world. Uh. And I did want to put
in here that that this company is not the only
entity that's in in the robo chef game. Uh. DARPA
has funded a robotic chef, which is I mean, if

(14:32):
you've seen DARPA's attempts at making robots capable of opening
up a door, it's going to fill you with confidence.
They funded a study out of the University of Maryland.
It was published in early and researchers in the study
trained robots to learn how to duplicate actions by watching
cooking videos on YouTube. Now if they also learned how

(14:54):
to leave comments that would have been the most destructive
robot ever made, like forget for It, making war Robots
a cooking robot that can comment on YouTube, and the
game was games over. They used these data from eighty
eight videos involving the manipulation of one or more objects,
and then UH programmed the robots to train themselves in recognizing, grasping,

(15:17):
and manipulating a variety of kitchen utensils and objects. Now,
I hope some of these videos were my drunk kitchen
with Hannah Heart rightly. Also also Death Metal Vegan kitchen
experience where they just throw the the the like the
head of lettuce against the wall and then hit it
with an ax And I don't know I've ever seen

(15:38):
him do that, but it is a thing. Yeah, I
don't believe so, but I didn't I didn't have access
to the full sample set, so I'm not I'm not
positive it's a possibility. Well, I'm sorry. Please continue. When
when the robots were then tested on their ability to
replicate the actions from the videos that they were from
from other videos they were seeing for the first time, um,

(16:00):
the robots correctly recognized sev of the objects they were
dealing with They performed the correct grasps cent of the time,
and they guessed what action would need to be applied
to the to the two up to the object or
objects at hand of the time. So not not bad,
not bad robots, well, especially when you consider like the

(16:23):
wide variety that typical kitchen utensils can take shape and form.
I mean, even something as simple as a ladle can
look very different from one designer to another, absolutely, and
that means more challenges for for object recognition on the
computer side of things. Oh yeah, and they pulled it
off thanks to a convolutional neural network, which is the

(16:45):
same thing that Google's Deep Dream is using. Okay, so
it it tosses ideas around and it's in its own head,
its own robo uh computer head um and extrapolates on
the patterns that it finds there before spitting out a
response to it's seeing. And so so that plus like
a really highly specific taxonomy of grasp types and motions

(17:10):
were what drove this to to pretty decent success. So
that way it would know things like with the ladle,
you're dipping as opposed to stirring or whisking that kind
of thing. Yeah, because obviously a whisking robot with a
ladle would be hilarious but not terribly effective at making
whatever it was you were hoping that. I certainly wouldn't
get your crab bisk. No, you might get you crab
bisk on the ceiling. That might be about as good

(17:31):
as you get. I just thought of another great video.
They should have shown these robots what it should be,
the Harvey Corman as Julia Child's Alien baking video and
Star Wars special Whiskster whiske Sirs. I have no idea
what you guys are talking about, but I'm delighted. I mean,
I haven't seen it. As we're going to huddle around

(17:53):
and watch a video when this is over, Okay, I'll
just let's mark out an hour and a half of
our lives will get back and and okay. So DARPA
is probably not interested in robot chefs. I just wanted
I wanted to put in here um. But but a
representative of DARPA indicated that this technology could have applications

(18:13):
and I quote in areas such as military repair and logistics.
Military repair, I understand logistics that terrifies me, but you know, hey,
go go DARPA. I'm glad that you're funding robotically. I
can't win along without breaking a few eggs. I can
see legit. Okay, So I mean one of the ways
we see DARPA logistics in robotics is in just carrying

(18:36):
things like the DARPA four legged you know, the DARPA
dogs and stuff like that. They move over difficult terrain
dynamics big dogs exactly. Yeah, So all right, see it well?
And and I like the idea that with this and
the Grand Challenge, which you know also I made a
joke at the beginning about DARPA trying to open a door.
To be fair, what DARBA does is it funds the program.

(18:59):
Other people try and make robots to open doors to
hilarious results. But I like the idea that eventually DARMA
is going to have a robot that will come to
your house, open the door, break into your home, and
then make you dinner. That's the future I want to
live in. Like it's terrified but also kind of comforting.
So it does one random house each night. It's like

(19:19):
tonight might be the night. Right, you hear some pounding
on the front door, You're like, is it is it
tonight it's robot claw. We get cram, so canceled that
pizza order. That's right, right man. I want to live
in that future so so less ambitious than these robots
that would be capable of of learning from chefs and

(19:42):
being able to replicate a chef's motions and processes so
that you could create amazing dishes. Are some other robots
that are being incorporated into workplaces. In fact, there's one
that's been around for a few years. I think the
last the first video I ever saw that was from
two thousand twelve h um And it's one that's been
used in in kitchens in China and also Los Angeles

(20:05):
now has one apparently. Um So there's a gain in
a shoe room. Kwan who owns restaurants in Beijing, China,
and created a robot to cut noodles. And the way
that it cuts noodles it holds this big essentially like
almost like a log of dough, and then it has
a knife in one arm one hand that just kind

(20:27):
of makes a windshield wiper motion as the other arms
slowly rotates the log so that it just cuts strips
off of it, and the strips become these long flat noodles,
and it can do different style noodles, but that was
the one that was on display in the video, and
according to the inventor, it can go about twice as

(20:47):
fast as your typical human can go, and said that
in a way, the robot actually became a necessity. It
wasn't that, uh, he was trying to replace human employees.
It was that he was having it. He was seeing
that was coming more difficult to find young people who
wanted to work in restaurants cutting noodles because the job
is monotonous, it's repetitive. It's the sort of stuff about

(21:11):
the interesting part of working in the kitchen, right, And
also it's it's what we hear when we hear roboticists
talk about why we want automation to take over jobs
that are dirty, dull and dangerous. Right. This is possibly
dangerous because you're using a knife, but more so it's dull.
And if it's still then you can get give you
dangerous anyway. Sure, Well, in and repetitive motions, injuries are

(21:33):
absolutely a thing in that kind of industry. Yeah, you
could have like essentially the equivalent of tennis elbow, but
you've got it because you're you're just doing the same
motion throughout the whole day. The robot can keep doing
it until it needs maintenance. Right, it's not going to
feel pain. Sure, they did not program it to do so.
And of course that automated preparation of certain food stuff

(21:55):
sizes and portions and stuff like that is nothing new
inherently because you see out of the industrial level. But now,
I guess what's interesting here is that this is this
is at the end of the consumer chain, pretty r
in a restaurant where you are making homemade noodles within
the restaurant. So it's not like you've ordered the noodles
that were produced in some factory that had a huge

(22:17):
automated assembly line that created the noodles. You're actually making
the dough in house, and then you are cutting the
noodles in house with this robot. He also designed it
to have kind of this humanoid shape and it has
sort of a retro robot look to it, like it
makes me think of classic Japanese animation um uh and uh.
It has this uh, this you know, very stylistic approach

(22:42):
that is completely unnecessary. Really when you get down to it,
it's it's two arms warm that holds the wad of
dough the or the log of dough, and the other
arm that holds the knife that does this windshield wiper motion.
But he's created it where it's got a torso in
the head and eyes, so it becomes almost like a show.
So it becomes a part of the inner tee mit factor,
the attraction of going to a restaurant. And thus one

(23:04):
could argue it adds value, not just because it's doing
a job that people either don't want to do or
it's not really great for people to do all day
every day. Uh. And it's in itself a curiosity that
draws people in and thus drives business for the restaurant. Uh,
which is kind of cool. I like that idea that

(23:25):
it's not just an automation response to a problem, but
also a creative way to um engage people's curiosity. Granted,
just gonna put this out there. If you see a
robot flashing a knife around, don't get too close. Dude
will cut you right. Yeah, exactly, like like like the

(23:51):
Futurama robots that all have just a single purpose clamps um.
But then you you had mentioned the idea of you
know this, this is sort of like the the last
step between consumer and and dish. Yeah, I mean, i'd
imagine there's still lots of ways that are left to
innovate in in automation of food production earlier in the chain. Absolutely, yeah, there,

(24:16):
especially when you're talking about industrial size operations. Yeah. And
and those, I mean, the machines that are already producing
a lot of our our prepackaged foods are are things
of wonder and beauty is Joe about once a week
shows me a video of which one is your favorite one?
It's the baby Core Delicious Baby Core, Delicious baby Corn.
I'm sorry if you've never so earlier. I'm sorry I

(24:38):
didn't respond to your email, Lauren. It came at a
busy time. I think Lauren sent me an email to
a video done on slate dot com. Was it where
they were or maybe it was an article anyway, it
was something on Slate talking about the how wonderful it
is to just watch industry specific uh AD videos marketing pieces. Yeah,

(25:01):
marketing videos for industrial food harvesting and preparation technology. Because
they'll have like robots that get a bunch of Brussels
sprouts and sort them by size, and it's got this
dreamy music underneath it. It sorts the Brussels sprouts one
at a time. And I was thinking of like the
nineteen fifties, like blink blink, blinking, blinking, blink blink. Yeah,

(25:23):
there's some like that too, But my favorite one I've
ever found is the video for the industrial process for
the production of jars of delicious baby corn. And it's
not just baby corn, it's delicious baby They specified delicious
baby corn. You should look it up if you get
a chance. I will definitely. I am almost certain you've
shown this to me at some point. But at any rate,
so we're stay seeing more innovation in that area as well,

(25:45):
and in fact, one of them we haven't really seen yet.
It's going to be unveiled later on. We're recording this
March thirty one, two thousand and sixteen. And uh, there's
a robot that's um was creative of a partnership between
Universe DA of Lincoln and a company called O A
l which specifically uses steam infusion to cook foods, to

(26:07):
create a new robotic cooking platform called the Automated Processing
Robotic Ingredient Loading Robotic Chef System or APRIL and April
will be unveiled in April two thou sixteen, so we
haven't seen it yet. We we know little bits and pieces,
but a lot of it's been kept under wraps. Yeah,

(26:27):
we were. We are recording this, by the way, on
March thirty one, So as forward thinking as we are,
we can't see what happens in April yet, although I
have a feeling tomorrow is going. Tomorrow as of the
recording of this podcast is going to be a doozy um.
So the robot isn't meant to replace a chef in
a typical kitchen. It's a much larger operation than that.

(26:47):
It's meant to automate large scale food manufacturing, and according
to O A. L. Alice is all about quote recipeing
management and recipe control of liquid food products end quote.
So you tell about making lots and lots of stuff
with liquid ingredients, Obviously you want precision, You want consistency
for for matters of taste, for safety, for quality control.

(27:10):
All of this is incredibly important and and not necessarily
easy to do on huge scales. Yeah, I'd say here's
a good example, prepackaged chicken stock or vegetables stock. You know,
the stock that you'd used to make a soup with
or deglaze a pan with. This is an essential part
of a kitchen. You use it for all kinds of stuff. Uh.
And most chefs will tell you the stuff you can

(27:32):
get at the grocery store varies wildly in quality. But
even the best stuff you can get at the store
is just never going to be as good as a
stock you make yourself. Uh so uh so. But at
the same time, who has time to make stock? I
mean a lot of times people you just don't do
that years. Yeah. I mean also, yeah, like like who
who these days just has chicken bones lying around that

(27:54):
They're like, all these chicken bones are just piling up.
What am I going to do with them? They're not
And I have so many root vegetables and I have
three hours yeah yeah, So it's very very convenient to
have a prepackaged container of vegetable stock or chicken stock
or whatever that that you can use in your recipes. So, uh,
improvements on this at the industrial scale I can see

(28:17):
making a big difference for home cooks, well, especially if
you know, again, I keep coming back to consistency, but
it's incredibly important because I'm sure you guys have had
the experience of ordering some form of food product that
you have had before, but the experience has been totally different,
and like the flavor might be different, the texture might
be different depending on what kind of food it is,

(28:39):
even though it's coming from the same company, because we're
working with lots of ingredients that have variety to them, right,
there's a variety of all sorts of stuff that can
come into play, so and and that can be delightful,
but but on a on a very small personal level.
But more often, the consumer experience that we have been
sort of trained into, and furthermore, the the the brand

(29:02):
experience that most companies are looking to put forth is
one of absolute terrifying conformity. Well, it's it's because you
have an expectation and if that expectation, sometimes if that
expectation isn't met, it's all right, because whatever you get
is still get still good. Sometimes sometimes not. Well, I mean,

(29:23):
here's a question, I bet a lot of you have
had this experience. You you're not somebody who normally eats
at McDonald's very much, but if you're on a road
trip in an unfamiliar place and you don't know what's
around there, you might stop and needed a McDonald's or
some other chain because of the expect you say, I

(29:45):
basically know what I'm going to be able to get.
It might not be something I'm very excited about, but
it's not I'm not going to get something that's wildly
negatively surprising. I find I find that the uh that
I'm far more likely to do that if I have
traveled a long way so I'm tired, Uh that we
have already checked into a hotel, so the promise of

(30:08):
bed is close by. Yeah, and if my Internet connection
is such that I can't use a recommendation engine to
find out where is a good place to eat, I'm like,
let's just go to Chili's, or let's just go to
uh that fast food restaurant, or let's just go to
you know, something along those lines, because I know what
I'm going to get. Yeah, it's not going to blow
your mind. It's not gonna be great, but you at

(30:30):
least know there's something on the menu you can order
and you pretty much know what it's going to be. Like, Yeah,
there's the server is going to be wearing a certain
number of pieces of flair, right, Yeah, the flair is
important So let's let's talk about knowing there's something on
the menu that you can order and how sometimes that's uh,
that's a misleading. Well, I wanted to be able, so

(30:52):
I wanted to bring up something that's related to a
personal story that I'm sure Jonathan can relate to us
in a moment. Uh So, my question is a little
bit different than having a robotic chef, but it's still
a way of introducing automation into the dining process in
a way that can help it improve people's experience maybe
when they go out to a restaurant or something. And
that is what if you could have an automated system

(31:14):
for detecting food allergens hidden in your meal, that would
be good. It would because sometimes allergens president food are obvious.
So you might know that you're allergic to tree nuts,
and then your salad arrives at your table and you
see that it has hazel nuts on it and it
wasn't mentioned. You just didn't mention, didn't say hazel nuts.

(31:36):
But you know what hazel nuts look like. You know
you can't eat them because you can see them there.
So you play it safe and you skip this course,
or you pick them off if you're feeling brave, don't.
Don't feel brave, people don't not with anaphylactic allergy. Yeah,
but what about when food allergens are completely hidden in
your meal? This can happen all the time. The thing

(31:57):
that could nearly kill you could be alsified invisibly into
a sauce. I call these right, Or it could simply
exist in trace amounts due to cross contamination with cooking equipment,
like any sort of cutting board or knife that's been
used for one type of thing that you might have
an allergy to and then used for something else. Yeah, prep,

(32:19):
prep gloves. Even just even just a spill in the
kitchen if you have a very serious allergy, can be
life threatening. Right, So I imagine what if you could
have a device that you could just sort of hold
over your meal, or if it's a certain type of food,
that you could put a little bit of the food
into it and it could tell you like, oh, yes,
this does contain you know, lobster, or it does not

(32:43):
contain X number of parts per million of lobster. Well,
people are actually working on devices like this. So one
example I came across in the journal lab on a chip.
Good journal name a group of researchers described a device
they were referring to as quote, a personalized food allergen
testing platform, and the little personal name they came up

(33:04):
with for it was iube. And what this would be
is it's like a small device that connects to your
cell phone and then analyzes food for specific allergens. And
it works by carrying out what they called color a
metric assays in tiny little test tubes and these are
attached to the device, and it uses your cell phones
built in camera and an app on your phone designed

(33:28):
to detect allergen contaminants by light. So it has a
little led that illuminates what's in the test tubes. Your
camera looks and sees if it has any of these
allergens in it, and it can tell you. So device
is made to detect allergens and food already exists, but
they can be you know, expensive or bulky kind of big.
And the creators noted that this device is only about

(33:50):
forty grams in addition to your smartphone, which seems to
be the appeal. But the problem is it doesn't sound
exactly like a tool of perfect convenience just yet. According
to a U C. L a news release on the
device from December when the research was coming through on it.
To test a food sample, here's what you gotta do.
You gotta grind it up. You gotta mix it with

(34:12):
hot water and an extraction solvent, and then put it
into the tiny test tube. And then you gotta let
it sit for a few minutes, and then you mix
it with a series of other reactive chemicals, bringing this
stage of the test to about twenty minutes. And then
you can use your phone camera to examine the preparation.
And then the pictures are analyzed by the app on

(34:33):
your phone and it can tell you, based on the
color analysis, not just whether a certain contaminant is in
the food, but how much is there. So that's handy.
Uh so in in parts per million, maybe you know
that one part per million of hazel nuts isn't enough
to set you off. So in other words, you could
you could the waiter comes up the so and you
can say, well, the good news is there are no

(34:53):
detectable allergens in this food, so i'm it's safety. The
bad news is it's done right. You've been It's just
taken you forever to do this. So that's obviously a
problem with the technology as it exists at this stage.
Now this was back in I haven't seen any more
recent news on this device, but maybe it's convenience or

(35:14):
usability factor has been improved or is currently being improved.
But in principle, a future generation of a device like this, maybe,
if not necessarily, this device could be very useful to
people who have severe food allergies. And Jonathan, I'm sure
you could tell us how it might have been useful
to you personally this week. Yeah, so on Sunday, last Sunday,

(35:37):
we're recording this. Uh, March thirty one. So on March
twenty seven, I had a severe allergic reaction. UM went
into anaphylaxis, which is a systemic allergic response throughout the body,
marked in my case with terrible itching, swelling, uh and

(35:57):
eventually shallowness of breath and other and symptoms that required
a trip to the hospital, the emergency room where I
was treated for anaphylaxis. And uh, it was unpleasant. It
was a I've had it before, but I had not
to my knowledge, UM had it with any of the

(36:17):
stuff that I had I was eating that night. Now
I was at a seafood restaurant, and in one previous case,
seventeen years ago, I reacted to what we assume was lobster. Uh.
Every time you have an allergic reaction, obviously you know
you can, you might have a guess at what it
was that would set you off, but you don't necessarily
know unless you go to an allergist, and even then

(36:39):
it's not sure that you're going to get the answer. Um.
But I didn't go to an allergist. I just had
never had lobster other than some lobster bisk before, so
that was probably enough to prime my system. The first
time you encounter an allergen, you typically don't have a
massive reaction to it. You have enough that you realize, oh,
I shouldn't do that again. The second time you do it,

(37:00):
that's when you get That's when your your proteins kick
into gear and start releasing histamine and you start swelling
and having a demon and all these other nasty problems.
Uh So lobster seventeen years ago sent me off. I
did not have lobster. I had some coconut shrimp and
I had some um, some tuna. And now it's possible

(37:20):
that perhaps the cooking surfaces that were being used for
one or both dishes had contact with lobster, and that
in fact, it was some cross contamination I was dealing with.
It's also possible that there was a a mutation essentially
of what I'm allergic to, Not so much mutation as
just an expansion, which can Yeah, you might develop a

(37:43):
severe allergic reaction to say a honey bee sting, but
other bees, if they stung you, you might not react to.
Then one day that allergy may also include those other
beast things, and you might be just as allergic to
them as you would be to honey bees. Yeah, and
you can just continue to develop those throughout the rest
of your natural life, so or you might not. But

(38:05):
as horrifying as that experience sounds, I'm very sorry you
had to go through that, Jonathan. One of one of
the relevant facts about it is you're you're not sure
exactly what sets you off. Absolutely you have no clue. Yeah,
So you don't know if it's maybe now you are
you have this new allergy to shrimp that you didn't
really have before, Or it could be that there you

(38:25):
were right initially, lobster is the problem, and there could
have been cross contamination in the kitchen, or there could
have been some small element of lobster in something you
ate without you realize, but there was a lobster broth
in the in the shrimp batter or something like, yeah,
it could be any of those things, and um uh,
you know, without going to an allergist in releasing down

(38:48):
and going through the test to at least try and
eliminate possibilities, or going back to the to the restaurant
and being like, so, tell me about your lobster, Like,
tell me about the lobster used in your kitchen on
Easter Sunday. The safest thing to do, obviously is just
to avoid shellfish rather than to play roulette and see

(39:09):
if in fact I could ingest it and not have
that reaction. But so, how can one in these are
modern times just avoid an ingredient entirely? Well, so you
can go to a restaurant and say I've got an allergy,
which you know, restaurants don't always love to hear. But
you know, if you have an allergy, you have an allergy.

(39:31):
And I've got a thing to say about that in
a moment. But I don't know if you've ever had
the experience of you go to go to a restaurant,
or maybe you have had this experience of being this person.
Go to a restaurant with somebody who has multiple food allergies.
They have lots of allergies or intolerances or something that
that they cannot eat, and you know, this can be
embarrassing for them and it's uh, you know, it can

(39:53):
make it difficult to go out to eat. So you
have to let the server know, and then the servers
to write down all the things you're ergic too, and
then go check with the kitchen to see if any
of those things are in the dish you ordered, and
then at least one of them inevitably is, and then
the server has to come back and ask you if
you'd like to order something else, or if you'd like
to have the kitchen leave the ingredients out the ones

(40:15):
that you're allergic to, which sometimes annoys the kitchen because
you know, chefs prepare things a certain way. They have
a sort of spirit of the dish. They don't really
like to change it if they don't have Well, there's
also a process that they've set up that is usually
it's usually ideal for whatever dish they're making. And so
when you have to purposefully skip a step or or
something on those lines that throws off the flow as well.

(40:38):
So I have a proposal actually for a way of
making this simpler, and I haven't I looked for an
example of this on the internet and couldn't find anything
like it acceptance sort of analog version of it. And
this would be a food allergy smart card. So if
you're a person who has multiple food allergies, you can
simply have all of your allergens coated on do a

(41:00):
card that the server can scan with with their smartphone. Um.
And this could guide your meal selection, highlighting all the
menu items that you can eat as is with normal preparation,
and letting the kitchen know what to leave out of
your dissue if you do decide to order from the
danger zone of the menu. UM And I think this

(41:22):
this is an idea that sort of makes sense. Oh yeah,
this would make my life personally just a lot better
and and it would furthermore cut down on a very
real problem that kitchens are facing these days, which is
this verbal communication issue of like anaphylactic allergies versus intolerances
and preferences. Because a lot of us who have the
latter have learned that telling a server the truth, I

(41:43):
have an intolerance to this. I I prefer to never
have parsley on my plate. That kind of thing. Um
nets you getting the thing on your plate that you're
trying to avoid because the kitchen was busy and they forgot,
or the server was busy and they forgot, or or
any number of issues of miscu occasion are happening. Um.
But allergy. Allergy is like a magic word. You say

(42:04):
allergy in a restaurant, you know they don't want anyone
dying in their house. So what happens when you say
the word allergy to a server, if it's a if
it's a good restaurant, it will grind their kitchen to
a halt. Uh. They'll switch out their cutting boards, their
cooking surfaces, their implements, their gloves. It sucks. Uh. If
they don't have repeats of those things on hand, it

(42:25):
means that they have to sterilize things before they can
cook your dinner. Um. And so having a system that
can tell the kitchen the difference between a customer who
will be sick all night if there's a teaspoon of
wheat flour thickening their soup versus a customer who's trying
to follow follow a paleo diet and and genuinely won't
mind would be so rad for everyone involved. This is

(42:47):
particularly relevant today when you have a hyper awareness of
people about gluten and people who who frame themselves as
having a uh an allergy to gluten, when in reality
that tends to be fairly rare. And uh it's something

(43:09):
that restaurants encounter all the time. That I I mean that
you see a lot of restaurants proactively having gluten free
options on the menu. Uh, not because this is so prevalent,
like the actual condition is so prevalent in the population,
but rather that so many people have kind of have
have glommed onto this idea that somehow gluten is directly

(43:30):
contributing to an unhealthy lifestyle or has some or has
some other effect on their health that probably isn't actually happening, well,
you know, or you know, if if they if they
really wanted out of there, then they really wanted out
of there, and and that's a fair thing too, but
you know, it's it's just a different processing for for
you know, like just don't put flour in that one

(43:52):
or uh, or order something else or you know, whatever
it is that it is. Uh, I've I have I
have a deep intolerance to bell pets of all things.
And if something is if my burger is cooked on
the same surface that a bell pepper just was, I'm
going to be sick for the rest of the night. Uh.
Nobody wants it. Uh. And but but when I say, hey,
no bell peppers, sometimes the kitchen interprets that as like, well,

(44:14):
pimentos are probably fine, and it's just like, no, you guys,
all I want to do is not be sick for
the rest of the night. I mean, it's just that's
just the thing is that And when you look at
it on the kitchen side, you understand like this approach
where you have some method of verifying, like, look, these
things really do have a legitimate negative impact on my
health one way or another. Um. It just it would

(44:35):
simplify that that transaction so much and remove the awkwardness
that people do feel. I mean, you don't want to
be the person sitting at the table going like I
can't eat anything on this menu. And I've been that guy,
you know. Um, not not just because of allergies, but
for instance, I don't eat mammals. So there are a
lot of specially trendy restaurants I'll go to, and I'm like,

(44:57):
I'm gonna have to either ask for something to be
prepared in a way that it wasn't intended to be
because it's all got ox broth or you know, pork
belly or whatever in it. Um, or I'm just gonna
have to like I'll have like the house salad, just
don't put any bacon on it, please, you know. Um.
And so I've been that person too, and of course

(45:17):
now I'm the person who I doubt I'll be going
to any like well, I mean, I'll go to some
seafood restaurants, but I obviously I'm not gonna I'll stay
away from all the shellfish. Like if it's a shellfish
themed restaurant it's all shrimp and grits or something. I'm like,
I love shrimp and grits, but I love breathing more.
Breathing has one out over the the uh that battle

(45:41):
breathing versus shrimp breathing winds. Ah. Yeah, so great idea that, Joe.
I think that would be a really smart way of
handling this, particularly to just ease that that that communication,
which is obviously very important and also can get super awkward.

(46:02):
So I'm fully in favor of it, particularly as someone
who does not want to go through that process again.
Now thinking about it from the other side, I imagine
something like this could probably also be abused in exactly
the manner you say. Well, people just say they've got
an allergy to like thirty five different ingredients they don't
really like, in which case you'd be like, well, I

(46:24):
don't know why you came here, I can't help you. Yeah. Well,
hopefully people, Hopefully that kind of impersonal method of communication
would help people be more honest, knowing that they would
get the service that they're expecting, because I think that
the dishonesty stems from being afraid that you're going to
get the thing that you don't want. Um. So yeah,

(46:45):
and then you know, I think I think most people
in general are pretty good about not abusing those systems.
I really do. UM, I mean, I really ever mess
with no one whatever messed with the system. Well, I'm
not saying that no one would ever mess with the system.
I'm just saying that I realized that, of course, waite

(47:05):
staff and and cooking staff encounter way more people you know,
every single night, So to them, they may have a
different perspective of how many people are really just quote
unquote problem cases. But I would imagine that the over
the general population of people who would make these requests,
it's generally a smaller number than what like we probably

(47:28):
think it's smaller cooks cooking, UH staff probably thinks it's larger. Well. Yes. Also,
speaking as the daughter of a chef, I can tell
you that the temperament of many chefs would would lead
to uh perhaps a large amount of disturbance over this
kind of issue. I often one of the reasons why

(47:50):
I avoid going to trendy restaurants UH is one I'm
so totally not cool. But to it's it's because I
respect the work that goes into creating a dish, and
I understand, like if I look at a menu and
I see that beef and pork and other mammals are
just they play a massive part, and like almost every dish,

(48:12):
I just say that looks amazing. It's not for me
because I would prefer to experience a dish the way
a chef had envisioned it. Um. So I I also
take that as as a way of looking at Sometimes
you just have to accept their things that are not
meant for you and that's okay. Shrimp is not meant
for me, and that's not okay. But that's another story.

(48:34):
So let's wrap this up. Guys. It was fun kind
of having this conversation too, I mean, more of a
philosophical discussion than our previous Borg Chef episode was, but
it was really on my mind, uh once I was
capable of coherent thought again. So guys, if you would
like to reach out and give us suggestions for future
episode of ideas, send us an email. The address is

(48:55):
f W thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or
you can drop us a line on Twitter. Our handle
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you again really soon. For more on this topic in

(49:22):
the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot com, brought
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