All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

by josefchen on 5/27/2026, 8:14:40 AM

Comments

by: epsteingpt

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.

5/27/2026, 12:34:32 PM

by: utopiah

FWIW all of <a href="https://publicdomainrecipes.com" rel="nofollow">https://publicdomainrecipes.com</a> is available as a single 22MiB file at <a href="https://browse.library.kiwix.org/viewer#publicdomainrecipes.com_en_all_2026-05/publicdomainrecipes.com/" rel="nofollow">https://browse.library.kiwix.org/viewer#publicdomainrecipes....</a> from <a href="https://browse.library.kiwix.org" rel="nofollow">https://browse.library.kiwix.org</a> and you can submit more recipes at <a href="https://github.com/ronaldl29/public-domain-recipes" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ronaldl29/public-domain-recipes</a>

5/27/2026, 7:44:00 PM

by: leontrolski

Neat.I'm trying to compress recipes into little schematics <a href="https://leontrolski.github.io/recipes.html" rel="nofollow">https://leontrolski.github.io/recipes.html</a>

5/27/2026, 12:10:14 PM

by: coldtea

>from 11 sources spanning seven languages, English, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, German, and Indian-EnglishSo hardly "all of human cooking"...

5/27/2026, 1:35:38 PM

by: dhx

See [1] for a demo, seemingly of an older iteration of what this paper describes. I was curious what ingredients the demo had selected (1032 available vs 1790 this paper selects) so I tried some obscure ingredients from "Organum: Nature, Texture, Intensity, Purity" by Peter Gilmore[2] (known for Quay restaurant in Sydney, Australia).It's got some adventurous ingredients such as juniper berry, macadamia nut, nigella seed, orange blossom water and lemon verbena. It even separates sesame oil and toasted sesame oil. Even though the ingredients list only has "rice", "black rice", "brown rice" and "glutinous rice", when you select "rice" as an ingredient, the recipes it generates are smart enough to advise of chilling cooked jasmine rice before using in a fried rice, and smart enough to soak and rinse Basmati rice before using in a pilaf. If selecting "lamb" as an ingredient, the recipes it generates will choose the cut as shoulder or shank if you select vegetables normally associated with braising.It doesn't know of grapeseed oil, orzo, mangosteen, lemon myrtle, and of course anything that only Peter Gilmore might use in a recipe and most chefs would have never heard of (karkalla as an example). I don't see this being too much of a limitation because such ingredients are quite localised or speciality. It knows of "pumpkin seeds" but not "pumpkin"--that is "squash", so there are some localisation improvements which could be made to improve British and American English use. I tried pairing "lamb" and "avocado" together in the hope it'd generate a recipe with a salad, but this failed. I then realised the ingredients list doesn't include lettuce or rocket, but has "salad greens" instead (American English) and no matter what I tried (other salad ingredients, chicken or no protein), it would not give me a salad. It kept generating wannabe-fancy dishes of a chunk of protein surrounded by tomato gel (agar agar) and a smear of avocado, or similar.[1] <a href="https://epicure.kaikaku.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://epicure.kaikaku.ai/</a>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gilmore_(chef)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gilmore_(chef)</a>

5/27/2026, 2:07:50 PM

by: bhouston

I saw this on X/Twitter. I do not believe that human cooking, and all of its techniques and ingredients and the various ways that things can be prepared in different cultural contexts can be compressed in to 2 megabytes.It is sort of like saying here is a 1GB model that can do tool calling and coding and then you try it out and it barely functions. Yes, it technically is a 1GB coding model, but it isn't a good one.

5/27/2026, 1:42:53 PM

by: throwme_123

I would not trust a model/corpus about food that includes English and German, but excludes Italian and French

5/27/2026, 1:26:20 PM

by: Retr0id

> [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.

5/27/2026, 12:35:04 PM

by: arjie

I had Claude Code implement this for me with the data and information from there and it seems all right. Maybe it works well for substitutions rather than recipe construction: <a href="https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/recipe-model/" rel="nofollow">https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/recipe-model/</a>

5/27/2026, 6:11:20 PM

by: mrhottakes

Similarly, all of human programming can be broken down into 128 characters

5/27/2026, 6:28:47 PM

by: haaz

Published by Kaikaku, a London based startup doing automated restaurants and cooking

5/27/2026, 12:15:50 PM

by: 21asdffdsa12

I forgot this to raise it in the last food related thread - so here is the after-wit: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fa-map-of-breakfast-based-on-ratios-of-milk-eggs-and-flour-v0-5rwpwwyjuolg1.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df622f0075402cb4dc4a926f6b91656086f5a4fab" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....</a>The triangle of flour - milk and egg- held eggnog, but eggnog contains alcohol, which is made of starches, usually flour.. thus being percentage-wise closer to flour then displayed. Yes, so much on the spectrum..

5/27/2026, 1:57:52 PM

by: BigTTYGothGF

Looking at Table 2 I wonder why Chinese and Korean are similar enough to go in one huge bucket (1.5M) but Japanese is distinct enough to get it's own tiny bucket (33K).

5/27/2026, 5:12:55 PM

by: jnmandal

Title is pretty clickbaity. Cool data set though

5/27/2026, 6:41:28 PM

by: foresto

This title evokes memories of The Twilight Zone's To Serve Man episode.

5/27/2026, 5:58:20 PM

by: cuechan

I don't really understand, what the Graphs on page 9 and 13 represent, but they look somewhat like a world map with the continents. I wouldn't be surprised if there's actually a geographic connection. A lot of ingrediants are probably more prevalent in certain world regions.

5/27/2026, 1:42:30 PM

by: h_a_n_k

this is the goat, the pinnacle of ai use, i'm all for it, haha. honestly one of my fave things i've seen

5/27/2026, 6:38:38 PM

by: sumeno

It makes me take the paper less seriously when one of the authors is submitting it with an inaccurate clickbait title.

5/27/2026, 4:54:58 PM

by: subscribed

Clickbait title, post should be removed.

5/27/2026, 2:28:49 PM

by: vitto_gioda

Why haven’t you analyzed Italian recipes in Italian?

5/27/2026, 1:22:38 PM

by: moffers

At uncook we’re in the middle of glamming up our ingredient normalization pipeline, so this is VERY welcome right now

5/27/2026, 1:47:52 PM

by: talktalkmake

All of recorded human cooking compressed into 2 megabytesWe've lost more than we know

5/27/2026, 3:01:35 PM

by: skinfaxi

Cooking/recipes seems like it would be an excellent application for a specialized model.

5/27/2026, 1:13:43 PM

by: nyokki

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").

5/27/2026, 1:24:50 PM

by: prmph

"All of human cooking" how?Does it have African ingredients??Clickbait

5/27/2026, 3:39:39 PM

by: zabzonk

WTF? I found this a parody. Perhaps because I've just been re-reading C.S. Lewis's "That Hideous Strength", where language becomes meaningless, I can't stand the design of the site or the text it presents.Making a nice lentil soup doesn't require any thought or description. I know that I, and millions of cooks in Asia will do it with just their hands.

5/27/2026, 2:42:07 PM

by: selectedambient

this seems more like the very tip of the iceberg here v a complete database, anyhow very neat

5/27/2026, 4:14:48 PM

by: vrganj

You can use it to browse flavor combinations here, seems quite neat!<a href="https://epicure.kaikaku.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://epicure.kaikaku.ai/</a>That being said, I'm not excited about the idea of this being used to automate cooking somehow.Food, to me, is part of what makes us human, where we express our soul for lack of a better word.The idea of taking that away feels like robbing us of our humanity.

5/27/2026, 1:37:51 PM

by: NopIdoN

I just want say a week's worth of human cooking compressed into a pellet

5/27/2026, 4:22:12 PM

by: rcarmo

It’s soup, right? Has got to be soup.

5/27/2026, 2:30:13 PM

by: pfdietz

Cooking condensed beyond the point of usefulness.It's another book for Zach Weinersmith.

5/27/2026, 12:48:51 PM

by: jonstewart

Jacques Pepin's knuckles don't compress.

5/27/2026, 1:46:01 PM

by: jweisbin

"human cooking"? ewww

5/27/2026, 12:52:21 PM

by: 1970-01-01

11 sources is not "all of" anything. You have a sample. The title is horrible. Fix the title please.

5/27/2026, 1:01:08 PM

by: 6d6b73

"11 sources spanning seven languages, English, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, German, and Indian-English"1. English food is not really food, should not be included. :)2. 11 sources is nowhere near close to "all of human cooking"..

5/27/2026, 5:57:36 PM

by: antirez

Odd not including French and Italian recipes.

5/27/2026, 12:51:06 PM

by: system2

BS Title. 30 pages of summary is not all human cooking.

5/27/2026, 6:56:14 PM

by: suddenlybananas

I don't see why the title needs to be quite so grandiose.

5/27/2026, 12:21:57 PM

by: baalimago

Great, so now chefs are being replaced too..!

5/27/2026, 1:25:48 PM

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5/27/2026, 1:22:57 PM

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