Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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Systematic Food Discovery

Using systematic system to "discover" new foods
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There is a process in material sciences where they use a systematic process of trying out combinations of materials to discover new useful properties. It involves alot of automation and computerized tracking, why not apply that to food science to discover new foods which never have before existed? Food is a multi-billion dollar a year industry, just a single hit would pay for the cost of screening out the millions of samples.
ddn3, Jul 11 2010

Ecclesiastes 1:11 http://xkcd.com/720/
[mouseposture, Jul 11 2010]

Evolv-a-Drink Evolv-a-Drink
Another idea relating to above xkcd [DrWorm, Jul 12 2010]

Dolphin cheese cheese_20from_20the_20sea
for [manicdictator] [pocmloc, Jul 13 2010]

some appetizing discoveries https://web.archive....com/strange-foods/
[xandram, Jul 13 2010]


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Annotation:







       fried chocolate pizza
baked chocolate pizza
boiled chocolate pizza
sun-dried chocolate pizza
microwave chocolate pizza
...
baked custard pizza
boiled custard pizza
sun-dried custard pizza
...
baked custard lollipop
boiled custard lollipop
...
pocmloc, Jul 11 2010
  

       //Food is a multi-billion dollar a year industry, just a single hit would pay for the cost//   

       Got any sequiturs?
pertinax, Jul 12 2010
  

       ...
bacon and egg ice-cream
...

...
snail porridge
...
hippo, Jul 12 2010
  

       ...
lemon drizzle pizzle
...
calum, Jul 12 2010
  

       Is this not the process we went through in Palaeolithic times or before which led to the diets we pursue today, along the lines of "don't eat the red berries", "don't eat yellow snow" and so on?
nineteenthly, Jul 12 2010
  

       Why restrict your imagination to food? Just because in paleolithic times that was the main question? This would be much like drug discovery. Once the system was in place, hits besides "food" might include lust, painlessness, sleep, smarts, vertical leap, warts vanish, angst and so on.
bungston, Jul 12 2010
  

       [manicdictator], those are new recipes, not new foods.
pocmloc, Jul 12 2010
  

       //Smoked earthworm & antelope placenta foie gras in a bed of pondweed//   

       Oh for goodness sake. You can't make foie gras from any kind of placenta.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 12 2010
  

       [pocmloc], ?   

       Boiling or microwaving your pizza doesn't make it's 'food' status any newer in your book so why write the first anno with all those repetitive lists of 'new recipes'? Hypocrite.
daseva, Jul 12 2010
  

       Those things are all food already. This idea is for substances. Molecules.
bungston, Jul 12 2010
  

       Oops, yes, there is something in that. I will humbly make the same criticism of my own contribution. The idea clearly calls for new foods to be discovered, not new recipes. This is turning out to be a harder challenge all round that we had expected, so perhaps we should take this idea more seriously than hitherto.   

       In which case I’d like to enquire of [ddn3], what are the //materials// which are going to be combined to discover the new foods?   

       edit to agree with [bungs]
pocmloc, Jul 12 2010
  

       Oh, PLEASE don't do that. Even if he's correct, now you've gone and swollen his head again.
normzone, Jul 13 2010
  

       All good ideas but as u can see you can't test or even make all those combinations and keep track of them in ur head or by hand. You need a computerized scheme and systematic formalized testing matrix, which is what the idea proposes. A systemic way to discover new foods.   

       The process in which the old way was not systematic. It was more fortuitous and pragmatic, I suspect people in the past rarely every "tried" new foods, as it was too dangerous.   

       10000 people + automated food factories = 1 million samples tested a day, mean time to discovery of "big hit", 2 years! Return on Investment? Priceless :)   

       Due to the limitations of technology materials will have to be formalized into pellets for hard food, liquid, gels and foam are also allowed and they are recombined in a systematic way as well , this includes the cooking process, condiments and any 2ndary glazing or finalizing step (as needed for candies and such). The samples then are sent out to peer testing, using the standard scientific method and ranked. Maybe smart algorithms can "home" into potential winners to reduce the need for excessive testing (they do this in materials science too).   

       Deep friend chipmunk glazed in a honey sauce made from caviar of the endangered yellow fin tuna for instance (note the complex multi-layered food + condiments).   

       -ddn
ddn3, Jul 13 2010
  

       [Maxwell_Buchannan]//You can't make foie gras from any kind of placenta.// You can if there's cord blood left in it. You can make anything out of pluripotent stem cells, can't you?
mouseposture, Jul 13 2010
  

       I don't understand how a food could never have existed. Like tribes in Africa who eat special spiders, worms or whatever. They exist but then they turn to food once someone eats them.
xandram, Jul 13 2010
  

       I'm cool with those; my concern is more with finding out whether the author had seen the xkcd cartoon before coming up with this. The ideas are very, very similar.
jutta, Jul 13 2010
  

       I didn't see the xkcd cartoon before i posted. My inspiration was from the material sciences and biological automation technologies for gene sequencing mostly. Even though the ideas are similar (ie food recombinations), this idea focus more on the automation and systematic process of testing, with the commercial goal of making a food "breakthrough".
ddn3, Jul 13 2010
  

       An implementation of something like this, but for recipe optimization rather than discovering new things to make food out of, was Ben Krasnow's "Cookie Perfection Machine".
notexactly, Oct 10 2019
  


 

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