The Memory of Spice

by Arun Jayaprakash

Background Context: In Bangalore's restaurant sector, where profit margins determine survival, a restaurant analytics company develops an AI that promises to optimise traditional recipes while maintaining "authenticity." The system analyses thousands of food delivery ratings, customer preferences, and regional cooking patterns.

Gen AI Tool and Use-case: IDLI-GPT (Interdimensional Deep Learning Intelligence-Gastronomic Probability Tensor) - A generative AI system that modifies recipes based on mass preference data, ingredient costs, and cooking efficiency. It creates slight variations of traditional dishes, each imperceptibly altered to maximise profit margins while maintaining positive customer ratings.

Stakeholders and Driving Forces:
Small restaurant owners pressured by rising costs
Home cooks selling through delivery apps
Food aggregator platforms pushing standardisation
Traditional family-run establishments
Ingredient suppliers and local farmers
Cost-conscious consumers unaware of the changes

Sequence of Events:
Restaurants quietly adopt the AI to survive thin margins
System begins subtly altering recipes, replacing ingredients
Success leads to mandatory AI "quality control" on delivery platforms
Traditional ingredients become commercially unviable
Family recipes start disappearing as standardisation spreads
Food culture homogenises as AI optimises for mass appeal

End State: By 2026, Bangalore's restaurants serve mathematically perfect versions of dishes that taste right but feel wrong. A sambar might contain 23 optimal ingredients instead of a grandmother's 12. Family recipes disappear not through rejection, but through imperceptible optimisation. While food becomes democratised through lower costs, something essential vanishes - a loss most won't notice until it's too late. The true horror lies not in the algorithms' efficiency, but in how eagerly customers devour these engineered tastes, unaware their palates have been quietly reprogrammed, bite by bite.

The real cost isn't measured in lost recipes, but in a generation that will never know what they've missed.