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I, Robot Chef

IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, can generate ingenious, original recipes, but does it really understand why humans love food?

by
Liel Leibovitz
June 26, 2015
Photocollage: Tablet Magazine; photos: Shutterstock/ImageKid
Photocollage: Tablet Magazine; photos: Shutterstock/ImageKid
Photocollage: Tablet Magazine; photos: Shutterstock/ImageKid
Photocollage: Tablet Magazine; photos: Shutterstock/ImageKid

Having completed a doctoral dissertation on things like the ontology of digital media and the epistemology of human-machine interaction, I thought I knew one thing for certain—that computers can’t cook.

Watson begs to differ. IBM’s masterwork of artificial intelligence began life a decade ago, on a lark: One of the company’s engineers watched Jeopardy! playing on a TV screen at a restaurant and wondered if a machine could ever beat the show’s best human players. A year later, after having been fed 500 clues from past episodes of the quiz show, Watson could answer about 15 percent of the questions correctly. By 2010, and with the help of a staff of 15 and a phalanx of graduate students, Watson was getting good. In February of 2011, on a very special episode of the show, he beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the show’s human champions, walking away with a million-dollar prize.

IBM, however, was after more than Alex Trebek’s cash. Watson is a machine trained to understand the natural language patterns of humans and then access vast databases in search of an optimal answer to any question. Silly trivia was one thing; helping save lives was another. Given access to Memorial Sloan Kettering’s patient records and histories, Watson had, by 2013, analyzed 605,000 pieces of medical evidence, 2 million pages of text, and 25,000 training cases, and had the benefit of 14,700 hours of physicians helping it fine-tune its accuracy. It got so good that a doctor could feed it the patient’s file and a few simple sentences about the patient’s symptoms and receive, 30 seconds later, a well-reasoned diagnosis and a suggested course of treatment. Soon, some in the field estimated that whereas a doctor diagnosing a patient was right, on average, about 50 percent of the time, Watson called it correctly in nine cases out of 10. The system was soon in great demand in hospitals and clinics across the nation, and applications for the financial, retail, and public sectors soon followed suit. IBM’s CEO announced last year that Watson is expected to bring in as much as $10 billion in revenue by 2024.

But all work and no play makes Watson a dull boy, and so the company decided to unleash its algorithmic predator in the kitchen. Earlier this year, Chef Watson released its first cookbook and invited beta users to share in a playful database that used the computer’s superior skills to parse reams of recipes, analyze the food combinations that made each work, and suggest pairings that might not have occurred to the ordinary, bedraggled human.

How could I resist the challenge? A computer nerd by education and a voracious gourmand by weakness of will, I’ve often applied the rigors of the scientific method in the kitchen. My morning coffee ritual, for example, involves measurements and the sort of equipment some mid-sized Western European labs would be happy to have. I sous-vide my meat, dehydrate my fruit, and perform myriad other culinary experiments. Computer-assisted cognitive cooking, then, sounded like just the ticket for me.

And yet, something in me doubted Watson. You don’t have to have read Proust—although Watson, in his Jeopardy! days, probably did—to realize that a single bite of a simple cookie could trigger sentimental tremors of involuntary memory. The smells and the flavors of our youth imprint us with recollections, with feelings, with ways of comprehending the world. Food, and the inexplicable joy we take in it, is a large part of what makes us human. Could Watson really get all that? Could his culinary prognostication be anything but clinical and cold?

I fired up the software. Watson, I learned, had three key metrics guiding it in its process: It looks for surprising and unexpected combinations; it is mindful of hedonic psychophysics, or “the flavors that give people pleasure at a molecular level”; and it seeks synergy, compounds that complement one another and make for a harmonious dish. You tell Watson what type of cuisine you’re interested in, or which ingredients you particularly like, or both, and it will scan the sum total of humanity’s recorded history in the kitchen and come up with a recipe that synergistically and surprisingly sates your hedonic psychophysical needs.

This being a machine that delights in the humbling of humanity, I had no intention of going easy on Watson by selecting some anodyne ingredient like chicken and clapping with moronic delight as it paired the bird with an apple vinegar emulsion. If Watson was truly to be Chef Watson, I needed to see what it could do to the most elemental dish of my childhood. Would it awaken some dormant stirring? Would it tap into the deep well of quivering sentimentality only the perfectly executed bite can excite? I clicked on Chef Watson’s “Pick a Style” tab and typed in “Israeli.” Then, I clicked on “Look for Ingredients,” and selected “Israeli couscous.”

Known to us natives of the Jewish state as ptitim, or flakes, these tiny, oily orbs are the stuff childhood dreams are made of. Ptitim is what many of us would smell when we opened the door after dashing home from school. It’s what we’d heap on blue plastic plates in army mess halls, lumpy and poorly prepared but still reassuring. It’s the first dish most of us, as budding adults living in cramped apartments with small and peeling kitchens, learned how to cook, taking pride in being able to sustain ourselves. It’s truly a national dish, our Israeli couscous, made all the more inevitable by the simplicity of its demands: warm some oil, sauté some onion, add the couscous and some water, bring to a boil, simmer for 10 minutes, fluff with a fork, and eat.

Not for Watson such elemental simplicity. The couscous, it instructed, is to be cooked with a handful of green peas and a dash of crushed red pepper flakes. Then, some more peas and a small mound of shelled fava beans were to be tossed in the pan with olive oil, saffron, cumin, and caraway seeds and then cooked until soft with some chicken broth and mashed into a coarse paste. Meanwhile, in a food processor, it was time to make salsa out of poblanos, habaneros, aji amarillos, dried apricots, lemon juice, and—who said that machines were incapable of infatuations?—some more green peas. It was time to put the dish together: first the couscous, then the fava paste, then the salsa. To that, Watson had me add wedges of Camembert cheese, a generous dusting of grated parmesan, diced celery, some currants, and, to make grocery shopping more of a sporting challenge, lovage, a pleasing herb. Toss all of these together, and Watson’s creation was complete.

It was terrific. The salsa was sweet and tangy and spicy, very surprising and yet synergistic as well and definitely pleasing, especially as it clashed with the umami thuds of the parmesan and the earthy softness of the beans. The lovage prickled the front of the tongue; the Camembert coated the back. The couscous slithered. The celery crunched. It was a delightful dish, perfectly interesting in every way. Except, sadly, it had no soul.

The pleasure of eating one of Watson’s concoctions is largely cognitive. It comes from stopping to think of the metrics of each bite, admiring the algorithm that cleverly composed such a sophisticated dish. Being a pile of hardware, Watson has no emotions, which means he keeps yours in check, too. No use telling him about that time you traveled to a remote restaurant in the mountains of some Greek isle for astonishing rack of lamb, seasoned with a pinch of salt and grilled to perfection, or about how the very first bite made you close your eyes and shake with gratitude for this universe and its many bounties. All Watson understands are components, and like every creature made of code those are only interesting to him if they are aligned just so to make something utilitarian and logical. Watson knows nothing about preparation, about the cook’s instincts, about fingers nicked and palms burnt, about the wild joys of simple dishes that fill us, like nothing else can, with strange and lasting peace.

Watson, in other words, isn’t a chef. It’s a tool, like a mandoline slicer, impressively adept at extracting new possibilities and awakening unknown potentials but best used in moderation. I’ll use it again, for sure, some day when the mind is hungrier than the gut. But when it comes to Israeli couscous, Watson can keep his caraway seeds and his Camembert to itself and leave me with fried onion, a little bit of water, and the promise, more dear and delicious than all of gastronomy’s allures, of a fleeting bite of my childhood.

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Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.