All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes
95 points by josefchen 6 hours ago | 34 comments

epsteingpt 55 minutes ago
The work is very interesting. The title is misleading.

A better title would be: "all of human ingredients compressed into 1,800 primitives"

There is little to substantively nothing about the actual cooking: preparation methods, proportions, etc.

But the idea that tomato goes well with beef the whole world over is very interesting and useful for creating flavors that will go together, perhaps surprisingly. It will be a nice resource in the future.

reply
CTDOCodebases 43 minutes ago
If you are interested in that you might want to check out this paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00196

reply
HappyPanacea 15 minutes ago
I would like one day to have a database which measure how strongly every food ingredient in use binds to every human smell receptors.
reply
Tade0 19 minutes ago
> But the idea that tomato goes well with beef the whole world over is very interesting

I saved a beef stew I was making for twelve people once by adding tomato sauce.

Beef hardens if stewed incorrectly and tomato acid tenderises it again.

EDIT: removed incorrect information about store bought tomatoes.

reply
throwme_123 3 minutes ago
I would not trust a model/corpus about food that includes English and German, but excludes Italian and French
reply
leontrolski 2 hours ago
Neat.

I'm trying to compress recipes into little schematics https://leontrolski.github.io/recipes.html

reply
teeray 2 hours ago
I like it. Reminds me a bit of the table format on Cooking for Engineers (scroll to the bottom of the recipe): https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/19/Erics-Chocolat...
reply
flobosg 56 minutes ago
I was going to say the same! You can also check the recipe card here: https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/19/Erics-Chocolat...
reply
karhuton 43 minutes ago
These are amazing. It feels so clear to see a visual ”map” of the cooking process before you even start.

This would help coordinate two cooks to make prepping more independent.

I’m trying to figure out if an landscape Ipad, with interactive elements for extra details if needed, would be a good UI for this.

-

Edit: Showed it to my non-Engineer wife and she said ”this is horrible” after staring at it for 10 seconds. Maybe not for everyone…

reply
NiloCK 2 hours ago
Ahh - the dependency graph recipe card. These are excellent. I've imagined something like this forever. Always annoyed that recipes put ingredients in a giant undifferentiated list and then give an instruction like "mix the dry ingredients in a deep bowl".

For a while I expected there could be a good return on a good implementation of this, but now as soon as a strong interface itself is created it seems easy to copy.

reply
gorgoiler 2 hours ago
”To bake an apple pie from scratch, first you must create the universe.”

— Carl Sagan

reply
mapipolo 2 hours ago
I love this! I bet you could make a successful recipe book based on this concept, with large schematics that a cook can read from a distance while working in the kitchen.
reply
InsideOutSanta 57 minutes ago
That's really neat and easy to parse, love it!
reply
danielvaughn 2 hours ago
It's amazing how much more readable this format is. I love it.
reply
hkt 2 hours ago
That is brilliant. Going to try some of yours then maybe transcribe my own favourites into the same format. You've struck on a great idea here.
reply
nyokki 4 minutes ago
As someone learning to cook from recipes in multiple languages, this is really cool. Curious how it handles the same ingredient called by different names (e.g., "scallion" vs "green onion" vs "long onion").
reply
Retr0id 54 minutes ago
> [Claude] performed all ingredient classification under deterministic decoding (temperature 0–0.1)

Not that it matters much in this context, but low-temperature is not the same thing as deterministic.

reply
cubefox 52 minutes ago
Yep. Zero temperature is neither necessary nor sufficient for deterministic inference.
reply
cj 48 minutes ago
Why?
reply
tempay 42 minutes ago
You can seed the randomness are still having nonzero temperature.

Numerical instability can introduce randomness especially on GPU like hardware unless you’re very careful about how you write your algorithms.

reply
vitto_gioda 7 minutes ago
Why haven’t you analyzed Italian recipes in Italian?
reply
haaz 2 hours ago
Published by Kaikaku, a London based startup doing automated restaurants and cooking
reply
skinfaxi 16 minutes ago
Cooking/recipes seems like it would be an excellent application for a specialized model.
reply
baalimago 3 minutes ago
Great, so now chefs are being replaced too..!
reply
antirez 38 minutes ago
Odd not including French and Italian recipes.
reply
TripleH 13 minutes ago
As soon as you start adding our beloved french recipes, frogs, snails and other oddities might substantially increase the 1,790 ingredients count
reply
jweisbin 37 minutes ago
"human cooking"? ewww
reply
suddenlybananas 2 hours ago
I don't see why the title needs to be quite so grandiose.
reply
muragekibicho 60 minutes ago
It's an appeal to the attention economy. "All of human cooking compressed into 2 MB" is(mentally) palatable relative to "Navigating the Emergent Geometry of Food Ingredient Embeddings".

Getting you to click is the ultimate goal.

reply
delichon 53 minutes ago
It's a good title in that it says something interesting about the scale of knowledge needed for functional expertise in the domain. Like a big fluffy cat that's just a wee little cat inside the fur ball.
reply
1970-01-01 28 minutes ago
11 sources is not "all of" anything. You have a sample. The title is horrible. Fix the title please.
reply
pfdietz 40 minutes ago
Cooking condensed beyond the point of usefulness.

It's another book for Zach Weinersmith.

reply