Golan Levin and Collaborators

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Computational Gastronomy

2 June 2010 / general, life

It can be a rewarding and entertaining exercise to think through the implications of prepending “computational” to various subjects of consideration — particularly those fields traditionally considered “outside” the purview of procedural science, like the arts and humanities. (As communications technologies inexorably revolutionize every aspect of contemporary life, such a gedankenexperiment is merely a reasonable strategy for planning for the very near future.) A recent conversation with my friend Joshua got me wondering about a new one, “computational gastronomy”, and reminded me that we would do well to consider computation in combination with the messiest possible subjects, like sexuality, spirituality and psychology. My initial research on computational gastronomy turned up relatively little (just a passing mention in a short story and a brief tweet from February) so I thought it could be helpful to assemble some preliminary proceedings for a virtual congress on this hot new topic. Here, then, I tender an index to some (very real) overviews and articles in emerging sub-concentrations of the field. Some of the titles are genuinely mind-bending, suggesting even stranger things to come:

Computation and Agriculture:

Recipes and Planning:

Computation and Food Preparation Technologies:

Analysis of Eating Behavior:

Food Interactions and Gustatory Displays – Proposals:

Star Trek Replicator - Computational Gastronomy

The Star Trek replicator, a computational gastronomy system.

XKCD #720: Recipes

From XKCD (#720): A speculation on genetic algorithms and recipe generation. (Thx @zzkt)


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