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"?

The Technical Manual explanation is that replicators save storage space by using statistical averaging techniques in the molecular patterns, resulting in single-bit "errors" that some people swear they can taste.

Yeah I've always been frustrated with this trope. Somehow, we're expected to believe that a technology capable to creating and assembling all the atoms in a chocolate sundae is incapable of modifying the recipe.

In my head cannon I've always understood this to mean that the replicated food is "too perfect" and lacks the human imperfection/variation you get with real cooking.

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.

Best way to handle a replicator is a semi-auto shotgun

Yea, that's what I always thought too. BUT then that raises another 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"?

Yeah, food is like music, it's just not enough to hit the right notes and there is infinite variations even with the same notes in the same order. Food also uses TWO senses so it's even more complicated.

It's probably difficult to program something to arrange atoms just the way your grandma used to.

I imagine it'd be a case of: "scan this food that I just made by hand, store its structure, and replicate that exactly later".

So the replicator could make Grandma's soup for you, but it would always be exactly how Grandma made it that one time.

Just don't forget your safety goggles!

Replicators don't simulate cooking though, they rearrange atoms. It's an entirely different process and I have to imagine that translating between them is more of an art than a science.

I just want to say I think you should post more discussion prompts while stoned bc I love threads like these

The averaging is the difference between a replicator and the absolute precision of a transporter.

The transporter has the level of precision and memory capacity to perfectly replicate real food.

The replicator is just a close approximation. It’s controlled for food safety and nutrition but the sense of smell and taste may be able to distinguish the food from a precise duplication.

Yea, they rearrange atoms but like that's part of my point. It's a highly sophisticated computer made to recreate food. A recipe has exact measurements like "500g of flour, mix with 1.5g yeast, 3.7g salt, 340g water", I would think they would be able to replicate that process

Somehow, we're expected to believe that a technology capable to creating and assembling all the atoms in a chocolate sundae is incapable of modifying the recipe.

Having been in close proximity to a number of engineering types, I can 100% believe this.

So wanting the ‘real’ thing may be part placebo, and part wanting to experience the random imperfections of a natural product.

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.

exact same thing every time

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.

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 know we're debating a fictional tool (I'm here for it) but I'm saying I don't think it replicates "the process" it replicates the end result.

I've always assumed that it replicates some original recipe perfectly, and that if you have it all the time it gets old. I read an essay once talking about how the Federation DOES have an economy, it's just that the main currency is novelty. The "rich" people in this future are the ones capable of chasing more novelty. Creators, explorers, scientists, etc. The "normies" have to make due with what this novelty-producing class "exports" to them via news feeds, replicators, vacation planets, holodecks, scientific advancement, etc. Oh to be a "poor" in the star trek universe.

The value in cooking isn't in measurements or simulations. Cooking is subtle and varied: ingredients differ, animals and plants are never quite the same. No two dishes are the same. And nor would we want them to be, that's boring.

Replicators are the same as AI is today: fucking slop

As an Italian, my grandma surely would have made anything on the replicator better

Including New York style cheesecake

The replicator kind of gives the answer when Troi asks: it has been programmed to have all food items provide appropriate nutritional content. It's why there's still a tradition of people cooking real food even though they have replicators. A few examples would be Pike, Sisko and his dad, and O'Brien's mom. Also most or all of the Maquis.

TNG episodes have touched on that very point. Data had played his music by duplicating famous musicians exactly, but, following Picard's advice, he began using variations of two or more combined, which Picard suggested was more like human creativity.

Transporters also have different modes based on the precision used, the lesser one being used for cargo that doesn't have to be reassembled as perfectly and takes less energy and time to do so. I hope they have safety measures to ensure a newbie transporter isn't moving people in the wrong mode.

Now that I think about it, it’s odd that the replicators never (or at least infrequently) produce absolute slop. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it essentially a specific form of transporter? Somewhere they must have a supply of whatever the atoms waiting to be combined into “food” are (recycling the ship’s waste??) so that when you say “cherry pie” it knows you need X amount of whatever atoms arranged in whichever format the data instructed. Given that transporters can malfunction, there should be some instances where the replicator grossly malfunctions and instead of an off-tasting slice of pie you get a mutant horror that looks like it crawled out of Seth Brundle’s lab.

There are industrial/cargo transporter platforms as well as industrial fabricator/replicators.

Perhaps only the ones in humanoid transport pads are set with the highest level defaults?

😂 I'm with you 100%. After I left my previous comment I had almost the exact same thought process. Why aren't replicators producing more slop?? It doesn't know what chicken soup tastes like. Chicken soup might be molecularly-speaking very similar to chicken shit soup.

Excellent points!

That’s a very interesting idea!

I hope they have safety measures to ensure a newbie transporter isn’t moving people in the wrong mode.

That would honestly make a great way of demonstrating how evil an authoritarian government like the Cardassians were. Have them moving undesirables around in cargo transporters, show the debilitating health effects its caused them. Maybe going through the cargo transporter doesn't turn you to goo, but it gives you cancer, infertility, etc.

Don't forget Neelix. He was always cooking up some sort of alien dish in the mess hall.

And isn't Klingon gak alive? I don't think the replicator can create living things.

Food uses all five senses. Besides taste and smell, we respond to the look of food, and also how it feels, it's texture. We even talk about "mouth feel." Crunchy, creamy, smooth, spicy, etc. are all a part of the sense of touch.

Hearing? When you are in a restaurant, and they rush a tray of hot fajitas past your table, don't you swivel your head to look toward it as soon as you hear that sizzle? How about the loud crunch of a Doritos, or a taco?

In Discovery it's said out loud: it's waste recycled, including shit.

Although image generation like we have nowadays with the abundance of AI tools was maybe only thought of in the late 80s, it suffers from the same thing. A generated image can look technically perfect (no misaligned hands, strange architecture or broken texts), but you still can sense it is a generated image - even though the generation tool makes a different image every time. The same way an early replicator may have left some unnaturalness despite it producing a perfectly fine chocolate sundae.

But they can add a range in every component and make it random in that range.

I hold against that the replicator in the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy - Arthur Dent got it to make proper tea, at the cost of using all the compute the ship had.

I had a feeling it was, it makes the most sense. An endless supply of organic compounds just speed running the cycle. Sometimes though the mushrooms are just straight out of the bins, not replication. Rinse before your eat.

Replicators are basically just transporters.

You can even feed material into a replicator. It'll turn the matter back into energy. Like charging a battery...

There's no technical reason for the limitations. They can make ethanol. They're programmed not to. They can create life. They're programmed not to. Etc.

Basically it's just a plot device.

A star trek ship with an eddie board computer would be quite fun

perfect answer! this is my new headcanon, thank you

Thomas Riker has entered the thread

It's the same process nature does, just in a tighter space.

Yeah that was my interpretation too. Replicated food is "soulless" in the same way as AI art is. It's missing all the little things that make something done by a human special.

I do think there are some episodes that have the characters fucking around with the replicator to try and get something more personalized to their tastes. So this could play into it a bit.

Not all replicators are created equally.

Starfleet standard-issue food replicators won't produce unhealthy foods, true alcohol, etc. If you ask for a hot fudge sundae you'll get something that resembles a hot fudge sundae, but which has the nutritional value of a balanced meal. If you ask for whiskey, you'll get synthehol. The psychological impact (sugar high, intoxication, tryptophan sleepiness, etc.) of replicated food is muted or absent compared to the real thing.

That's why people go to places like Quark's. His replicators produce real food and real booze, with all the psychological effects that come with them.

I feel in that episode its an implied dietary restriction. Like beverly has something in her record so she can't have more than so much fat or something.

The uncanny sundae. Mmmmm

"Which are the prompts for this food?"