Food robots

I love these videos. I find them soothing.

At the time I was pre-teen, Wonder Bread ran advertisements bragging that no human hands touched their bread in production. That caused us to act like gorillas making bread for we were literalists and everything was funny.

I like making bread. It's like arts and crafts. Then you eat it. Yesterday I made pita bread and I ate one just now and it's so excellent I cannot even believe it. Good as it is store-bought, my homemade is better although mine are not perfect. Each one is not uniform. Each one has a different amount of dough, rolled out imperfectly to different size circle with different thickness, each one fried a different length of time at varying heat as the pan gets hotter, and after all that the taste and texture is qualitatively better than store-bought

I love seeing the live dough grow right before my eyes. I love the feel of the dough in my hands. I like feeling it change, feeling the gluten molecules form at hand. I like shaping it.  I like how it stretches and sticks to itself to from a skin that becomes a balloon. And watching them puff up like balloons is fun. Flour tortillas do the same thing, although one is yeast and the other is chemical leavening. I have my own video of this if you care to see it. Pita bread puffing.

YouTube [robots making food]
* Robot Kitchen -- Behold the Future. (they're arms)
* Robotic pizza restaurant opens in California
* Burger Making Robot (an arm)
* Could this Robot Chef change the Future of Cooking? (Well, could it?)
* These robotic arms put a five-star chef in your kitchen
* Salad Making Robot Proves Food-Handling Tech
* Robotic Chef-RoboKiosk Cooking an Egg Sandwich
* This Robotic Chef Does All the Cooking For You (All of it? An arm.)
* Restaurant in China hires robots as waiters (human form mobile robots)
* Self-driving robots making food deliveries (looks like floor-cleaning robot)
* I made a robot that serves me soup
* Flippy the Burger Flipping Robot at CalibBurger Pasadena (an arm)
* Robot that makes 400 hamburgers at the time could take (hamburger on conveyor)
* Robotic chef can cook Michelin star food in your kitchen by
* ABB Robotics -- Picking pancakes
* We Tried to Steal Food From a Delivery Robot (Small Vehicle)
* Burger Robot (arm)
* How Food-Bots Are Changing How We Eat (arm)
* Fast Food Company Develops Robots.
* Robots Cook Food and Shake Cocktails. What's Next? (robot with arms and fingers)
* Zume delivers made-to-order pizza with robots

Fine. As mentioned we've had mechanized mass food production for over 55 years that I know about. These robots are less impressive than that.

Here's 15 minutes of mechanized food production. There's always some human filling the bins. Some human delivering the ingredients. Some human to pick out the oddballs, to straighten the misaligned bit, to clean the machines, keep them oiled and serviced, some human as part of the packaging. Always some human supervising the other humans. Some ape making my bread.

Crap. Not playable here. Plus, it's best muted.

Some food items really are the provenance of the industrialized world. Like cornflakes.

A few days ago I made cornflakes. How hard can it be? Turns out, you really do need industrial equipment to form those particular flakes in that particular thickness and uniform size. It's not extravagant equipment, just something with high pressure rollers with steam and dry heat. Other cereals need high pressure extruders with heat. The rest is measuring and packaging.

But even there, my cornflakes tasted better, cornier, because my corn kernels were milled right here at home so the cornmeal was not exposed to air longer than just a few minutes, then frozen.  Mass produced uses cornmeal by 100LB sackfuls transported from some other warehouse. Their machines can use a lot less water than my available methods. Theirs is better than mine and mine take too much time and energy to make. Mine taste better than theirs. But they win. They wouldn't exist with industrialization first. They exist because some industrialist thought, what can we make these machines do? They are glorious. But there is always something significant sacrificed.