Hey yall! I’m stoned af and watching star trek on a weekend, naturally. I lost my place since last weekend in TNG season 3, but I knew that I wasn’t far in so I just watched all the intros until I found where I left off. Episode 8 “the price”, Troi gets frustrated with the replicator for wanting a “real” chocolate sundae. This raised a question for me, wouldn’t food replicators be intelligent enough to simulate the process of “the standard” ingredients being processed into the recipe? Like I thought that was the point of being able to say “Earl grey tea, hot”. Like wouldn’t she just have to say “betazoid chocolate sundae” or whatever?
EDIT: SECOND QUESTION: Say you have a family recipe cookbook or whatever and the comfort food is in that cookbook, couldn’t you just say “simulate the process of making the recipe from this cookbook”?
I would imagine that the replicators do make the exact same thing every time. The same texture, ripeness, distribution of toppings, etc. each and every time. So wanting the ‘real’ thing may be part placebo, and part wanting to experience the random imperfections of a natural product.
Could someone with enough time and effort make the replicator able to create slight variations on the food that wouldn’t unintentionally poison people? Sure. However it seems like the replicator is used as a future MRE and that natural food is genuinely preferred by most people in that universe.
When you cook, you get to smell the smell of the food cooking and have a period of anticipation beforehand. Similarly when you go to a restaurant, you smell the smells of the restaurant and the food they make. With replicators, you don’t get those experiences because the food springs into existence fully cooked and hot mere seconds before you start eating it. And I can imagine it feeling pretty sterile. Like it was made in a factory rather than a kitchen. Like a microwave dinner is ready in 4 minutes and you kindof get your first whiff of it and the first feeling of the steam rising off of it into your face when it first comes out of the microwave. (It hardly has a smell when frozen.) Kindof a “has everything the body needs” kind of thing but with none of the other elements that make it the sort of experience that eating should be. So, yeah. I think the MRE analogy is a good one.
This has always been my head cannon as well. Even if there is some randomness to it, it will still be so much the same every time that eventually you will get bored with it. Compare that to the wild variation you would get with real ingredients and a messy human throwing various things in with the wrong amounts maybe leaving things out or adding in something else that normally wouldn’t be there, a wildly different take on the dish.
I imaging it is this, combined with memory saving. So each scoop of ice cream is the same scoop (3 scoops in that bowl are the same three scoops.) Maybe even more extreme with the “scoop” being a “replicate this 1 mL of ice cream and apply a scoop shape, where that shape is ‘round’”.
My evidence is that some recipes are simply not in the replicators storage of galaxy class ships. This indicates that it takes both storage and effort to get a recipe into the machine.