08 Oct 2014 High-tech tasting: You call this Thai food?
Thai food is tremendously popular around the globe, and it won a pile of extra media coverage recently with an innovative idea: a taste-tester robot, or electronic tongue, that’s programmed to distinguish authentic Thai dishes from bad wanna-be’s.
Good Thai food is great, but bad Thai food can be terrible. Hence the need for a robotic food taster. The “e-Delicious machine” is a food-tasting robot that its designers say can distinguish between authentic Thai food and inferior knockoffs.
The machine was developed by the government-funded Thai Delicious Committee (yes, really) at the suggestion of a former prime minister who had it up to here with eating bad Thai food on diplomatic missions.
The taster ‘bot uses sensors and microchips to scan food samples for specific chemical signatures. It can tell the difference between real Thai ingredients — authentic curry paste, finger root and galangal, for example — and lame imitations often used by Western eateries.
The Thai Delicious Committee, as quoted by The New York Times, describes the e-Delicious machine as “an intelligent robot that measures smell and taste in food ingredients through sensor technology in order to measure taste like a food critic.”
The research team has developed a standard protocol against which the chemical signatures of particular food samples are measured. The e-Delicious machine can spot those fakes and send up a flag as red as a Thai chili pepper, according to the designers.
The robotic taster was unveiled at a gala dinner in Bangkok recently, where diplomats were invited to witness the technology at work.
Other tasting technologies
Artificial tongues aren’t new but have been evolving. Most recently, Danish researchers developed a nanosensor that mimics “what happens in your mouth when you drink wine,” enabling winemakers to control astringency very early on. In Spain, researchers created a beer-tasting robot that can distinguish between varieties of brew.
Meanwhile, advanced technology can also create recipes: IBM has touted how Watson, its “cognitive computing system,” can analyse the components of ingredients to come up with novel ideas for dishes; find a few of them here.
New York Times: Read more here