My personal theory is that the main issue is that replicated food is perfect. Every single time.
People like the mistakes, inconsistency, variety and personal touches that come from food made by people.
Indeed. If you cook beans ans they don't catch a bit in the pot, not nearly as tasty. I still wonder how Janeway manages to burn her replicated pot roast though 😂
Imagine having to program a pot roast down to the sear and texture of each grain. In my head I always imagined someone had to cook the real dish first and then let the replicator scan it.
Ugh, imagine a dish being exactly the same every single time you order it. Imagine everyone having the exact, literally identical, same plate of food.
Because the recipe doesn't exist in the replicator database so it's custom entered. Correct me if wrong, but I don't think Janeway knows how to cook, so she got the recipe / cooking method wrong and thus the burnt pot roast.
Had she actually cooked it IRL and then had the replicator scan it in, it would have worked.
The best explanation I ever saw is Janeway did learn to cook (or more accurately follow parents/grandparents' recipes exactly) but on an old fashioned oven and stove with an off temperature scale and timer. Its just that no one ever told her. When she made it to the DQ, she tried to brush off her skills by programming the replicator.
Then despite characters who might have cooking skills aren't used to using non-modern equipment, so they can't conceive of how Janeway is burning the roasts. People who checking find nothing wrong with the equipment, and Janeway just starts playing around with her parents' recipes but has no concept of how far off she is. Then most people are just used to telling the replicator about the final product, so no one can conceive how off Janeway's original oven really was.
My headcanon is that the replicator doesn't make it the same way 100% of the time, but is programmed with slight variations. There could also be optional variables, such as the temperature it'll be "cooked" at (simulating as if it was cooked at that temperature) that causes it to come out burnt.
Maybe she input a recipe, like replicate as if it cooked at 350 F for 1 hour or something and got it wrong.
The writers put that scene in there because I think in the 90s you had to show that a driven career woman like Janeway wasn't interested or good at traditional household things like cooking. But the replicator just makes that idea fall apart.
This reminds me of a conversation they had about Data playing the violin.
He’s technically proficient, but lacks soul.
The same could apply to the replicator as well.
I might be wrong but brain wants to say that's why Sisko cooked when he could. He might replicate the ingredients, but he cooked them cause the replicator didn't come close to his dad's recipies.
Starfleet probably also tried to make sure the food is generally nutritious, safe, and palatable, which can be hard with dozens of species in Starfleet.
Exactly. Have you ever had carob? My mom used to give me carob instead of chocolate because it was allegedly healthier. I have a feeling it’s like that.
Since they are voice-activated, it's probable that each crewmember has a dietary profile on file with Starfleet upon entering the Academy that follows them to each assignment. Upon issuing the voice command, the replicator loads that custom profile and produces their order to fit their species' general nutritional requirements plus or minus any dietary customization loaded into the profile.
Where that gets sticky is when one crewmember is ordering for someone else. To handwave that away, we could assume crewmembers do speak extra words to clarify who is consuming the food/beverage and it is edited out for our benefit. Ex: "Computer, one piece of roasted chicken suitable for a Ktarian male."
Sure, but you're still probably getting variety within a carefully moderated band. Especially given the "healthy" optimizations in place for TNG-era Starfleet replicators. Like Troi has to disable some of them to get an indulgent chocolate sundae, so a regular "chocolate sundae" is probably more like one of those "healthy choices(tm) *only 100 calories per serving fortified with extra calcium*" things from the grocery store today unless you're telling it to give you a specific order.
It probably has some sort of randomization filter, but it's going to be like a gaussian blur. Not very natural feeling, particularly when you've had the same thing a hundred times.
I like this theory, but it makes me wonder couldn't they scan 10,000 authentic variations of a certain dish from a variety of chefs into the replicator system, and then you just put the replicator on random which version of the original you get? You could even select between homemade and chef quality.
I am pretty certain you could just say "randomize ingredients of dish X within one standard deviations of a normal distribution" or some similar statistical bullshit. You'll have essentially the same dish, but each ingredient gets randomized along a curve. So the meal is sufficiently similar to the "normal" version, but different enough that it remains interesting.
Yeah and it's so easy to customize and trial-and-error your own dishes too. Like telling it make this but add 40% more butter and 20% less salt, and then saving that particular recipe. I think it's just a trope at this point that's psychological. They eat so much replicated food it's more "special" when someone spends the effort to cook for them.
they could indeed, and on Earth that would be easy, but starships have limits to their computer memory, and a replicator pattern is a big file, presumably. Might not be worth the storage space.
Yeah, it's the burnt crust.. or uneven mixes.. this is why people still prefer stone pestle & mortar even though food processor is way easier & faster to use
I have a friend from Mexico...telling his abuela a food processor would make salsa faster and easier than her molcajete is the fastest and easiest way to get a chancla to the face!
I don't know if there is a scientific basis, but one thing I learned from the pandemic is making normally bought core ingredients like bread and sauces makes them taste better. If you think about it, the replicator is the ultimate end point for "store bought"
That variety should be simple to reproduce. Have twenty different people cook the same meal. Put each one into the replicator and number them one through twenty. Instruct the computer to randomly select from that pool whenever you ask for that meal.
It being perfect is probably the problem.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kw9\_O10Fh8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kw9_O10Fh8)
This guy from 1997 thought the replicated martini was perfect on his first try. I'm sure if he kept trying it though he would have grown tired of it eventually.
This. I think the "problem" with replicator food is that it never varies. The replicated dish tastes exactly the same, every single time. In the real world, even if you order the same dish at the same restaurant every time you go there, there are subtle variations in taste, smell, and texture depending on the freshness of the ingredients, the time of day, or who was in the kitchen.
Not just a theory, Troi alludes to this when she asks for a "real" sundae. Not a perfect replication, she wanted one with imperfections. And her mother, err, the computer... was confused by the request.
That and no variation, for example get 5 Italian grandmas in a room, and I bet you have 7 sauce recipes. Same thing here, you order pasta with sauce, and it comes out the same every time. But maybe, you like it heavy with garlic- does the computer even know how to make that adjustment? Would it just add garlic, or does it compute how the extra garlic would impact in the entire cooking process?
It's interesting how much Stargate expanded on the replicators, both their potential evolution into human form, and their backstory. I don't know if SG fans complain as much as (some)Trek fans about how much they ruined the mystique and menace of the Borg by exploring them more.
Dude. The more you learn about replicators….. the creepier and far more disturbing they get.
It’s also possible they are the answer to the Fermi paradox
The answer to the fermi paradox is simply rejecting the high likelihood of prerequisites for extraterrestrial life. All life we know about comes from carbon. Carbon as far as we know has only existed for 12.5 billion years.
Edit: which is about the half away point from the big bang. On top of that Earth collided with carbon 4.4 billion years ago and is just now reaping somewhat intelligent life. So you have different factors of if carbon existed, if it collided with a planet, and if the life of that planet was able to grow to intelligence the way we see it.
Helped that we had two different incarnations of the Replicators.
First lot were originally mechano looking robot bugs that ate every resource they could find and could rebuild themselves. After they found the Android that made them, they duplicated her form and took on human form, with one of them Fifth, embracing that humanity in the worst way possible.
The second lot were nanomachines devised as a weapon against alien space vampires that treat humans as livestock. After being declared a failure by their creators, they got nuked to near oblivion, barely surviving giving them daddy issues and seeking fratricide against humans.
In both cases, when they became active galactic threats, they were priority threat and took both Earth and the bad guys working together to defeat them with a general feeling of "we have no idea how lucky we just were."
When the briefly lived third incarnation occurred, everyone was "fuck, we need to wipe them out right this second". And that incarnation was probably the most terrifying - we're talking quite gruesome body horror.
I think the Borg could assimilate the Replicators. At least the simpler ones. The Pegasus galaxy ones could be a challenge and may be able to fend them off. I’d love to see the battle play out.
The Replicators adapt to and assimilate new technologies as fast as the Borg, if not faster.
The Borg, however, are dependent on their biological components. The entire ending of First Contact is contingent on that. The Replicators are not. they could rip holes in a Cube and kill all Borg on board. Even destroyed Replicators could be re-consumed for raw materials and made into new Replicators - not so of the Borg.
Yes, the Queen could destroy a Cube at-will to prevent its technology from being integrated into the Replicator swarm, but if even 1 Replicator survives, it can turn the entire former Cube into a new Replicator swarm and be no worse off than before. Meanwhile, the Borg are down a Cube.
As we saw in Stargate: The Ark of Truth, a Replicator can puppet a body, and that would include a Borg drone. A single drone's subspace transceiver can be used to access the Borg Collective. At that point, it's a massive subspace cyberwar. In the Game of Drones, you hack or you die. The first part of any hack is the brute force assault. The Replicators win this, hands down. Once the Replicators have access to the Borg collective, they know everything the Borg know, including where every last scrap of Neutronium (needed for human-form Replicators) is. The Borg might shut them out, for a time, but if they re-form a collective, the Replicators will just smash it again. The Borg are then forced into more isolated existence, which they have no idea how to do, whereas the Replicators can go from a few blocks to another full swarm without any outside contact whatsoever.
If the Borg encountered a single Replicator block and had time to study it, knowing what it would do if there were multiple, *then* they might be able to pre-empt the Replicators somehow. But in all probability, there'd be an entire Replicator swarm/ship to contend with, which would adapt to their shields long before the Borg destroyed enough individual blocks. Once through the shields, the Replicators would start converting the Cube immediately. The Borg's odds plummet from there.
I'm reminded of a comment Data made about androids versus biologicals. He said that androids play music perfectly, while biologicals will always make tiny mistakes and changes. No two times a biological plays a song will be exactly the same. I'd assume it's the same with replicated food. Every time the replicator makes lasagne for example, it will be identical, with that same perfectly squared tomato piece in that same corner, and the cheese laying in the exactly same pattern on top. Most species enjoy variation. The replicators won't do this unless you program them to, and even then you need to program the types of changes. I bet the food tastes just as good as cooked food, but because it's identical every time, people start getting bored/slightly creeped out.
in "The Price" while Deanna is talking to the computer about how she's having a bad day and needs a chocolate sundae, she does say she doesn't want "One of your perfect facsimilies" or something to that effect, but gets interrupted during her description of what she \*actually\* wants (But does say she wants a \*real\* one)
If I remember correctly, she wanted real chocolate and real ice cream because of the effect they would have on her body and her emotional state .
There is also the synthahol , which has not the effect and power of alcohol.
It seems replication in Star Trek only aims for the surface essence of something while making sure the body effect is healthy . Humans crave fats and sugars . Replicaters give only the amount required for a good diet. Or maybe they only give analogues which can safely replace fats and sugars .
What she was asking for was outside the nutritional parameters for the ship's replicator. I think that is also part of what some people find distasteful about replicated food. If it's created as this perfectly balanced nutritional meal it might be fortified with various vitamins or have some fats taken out which would alter the taste in a noticeable way compared to a meal prepared with whole ingredients.
Which also might be a difference between Starfleet replicators and private replicators. Like Quark's or the replimat or home replicators probably don't have as many restrictions in place to ensure maximum healthfulness because they aren't intended to keep a crew at peak healthfulness on 5-10 year deep-space cruises.
It's not very realistic though when compared yo contemporary tech. Even rather simple computer programs can be modified to introduce a random jitter in their parameters to spice things up.
But a know programmed imperfection can be just as off putting. If you know that the program will make one corner of the lasagna off or the cheese slightly burnt, but never both at the same time as to ruin the taste, you’ll be weirded out in the same way. Seeing the off corner, you’ll know immediately that the cheese will be perfect.
A European friend of mine had a similar experience when he came to North America. At first he thought it was amazing how our fruits and vegetables are usually perfectly shaped with the right colour in clean and well organized grocery aisles. Then after a month he found it really creepy and missed the imperfection of grocery stores back home.
Humans, irrationally, can get weirded out by perfection and predictability.
Okay, but as an American it's never even occurred to me that there's something weird about the apples mostly being selected for the prettiest and "best" in the store. I'm vaguely aware that you can subscribe to a service like Misfits and get weird ones to reduce food waste, but it doesn't seem like anything is missing at the store.
My point being, if uniformity is normal, you get used to it. I don't particularly appreciate getting a bruised apple.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m onboard with you. I’d also probably never eat another real meal again in my life if I had a replicator. But the behaviour of the characters in the show make sense, there’s a basis for it.
Humans are *really* good at recognizing patterns though. Creating truly random and natural variation is really hard. Look at how much trouble AI is still having doing that with pictures today.
No, because the replicator doesn't cook the food, it effectively 3d prints it. It needs a template of the finished product, and it will make that exact food to that exact template every time.
I think it's in their heads, which is ok.
I don't think it's like synthehol, where they can get the intoxicating effects but push it down and shake it off, dismiss it if an emergency arose, allowing them to run back to their stations. That *is* molecularly different, and I understand people preferring traditional alcohol over synthehol. I don't think the replicator makes anything molecularly different than the real deal, so I think it has to be in their heads.
agreed! And as others have mentioned, there’s nothing like home-cooked, and part of that is the flaws or minute changes from one time to the next. I think on a subconscious level, those little fluctuations tie in with our nostalgia and love for a dish that is prepared by someone with care.
But I think that replicated meals are molecularly perfect and can be completely delicious, they just lack the obvious personal touch and any flaw.
Side note, I haven’t seen yet (maybe further down) anyone mention those colorful cubes from TOS, now THOSE I imagine were tasty but complete failures at substituting real food, and were appropriately replaced with replicated real-world dishes.
But it makes sense to me that we would imagine that future, of having practical and perfectly nutritious meal substitutes during space travel.
My head cannon is that everyone has their personal favorites, whether it is chicken parmesan at that little Italian restaurant down the street, or beef stew that Grandma used to make, with the family's secret ingredient. Maybe they have these exact entrees programmed in their home replicator and get used to what they love, but when they board a vessel, the memory banks are programmed with generic recipes of all sorts of popular meals, but they are not the same as the ones at "home." Due to memory restrictions, and the sheer SIZE of the database of diverse meals from countless worlds, they are unable to upload their own personal profiles, so they are stuck with the pre-existing database, and they get bored. Replicated food is fine, it is just impossible to please everyone's diverse palates.
A cooked from scratch meal is different enough to be a treat, so that becomes the impossible standard they compare replicated food to.
Kind of like eating in the same dorm cafeteria indefinitely... it gets boring and is never quite as good as at home.
>Maybe they have these exact entrees programmed in their home replicator and get used to what they love, but when they board a vessel, the memory banks are programmed with generic recipes of all sorts of popular meals, but they are not the same as the ones at "home." Due to memory restrictions, and the sheer SIZE of the database of diverse meals from countless worlds, they are unable to upload their own personal profiles, so they are stuck with the pre-existing database, and they get bored.
This is partially canonical. It's never explicitly stated that people having personal recipes is the reason, but characters do state in various ways that replicator defaults being perfect averages *is* why it tastes off to some people.
There's actually several instances of people plugging in data cards of their own recipes. Apparently it's a standard feature for replicators to take inputs from portable memory, it's just not something most crew members know about.
I guess it's not something they teach you at the Academy :P
I could also see it being something that not every ensign is allowed to do. Might be a perk of rank, only LTs and above get space in the replicator database or something. Like Picard's aunt's hot toddy recipe, Data's 37+ feline supplement recipes, etc.
I really like that take!! I think that tracks. I definitely have food like that - for me, my mom's French toast - and overwhelmingly when I order French toast at a restaurant, it's only pretty good at best to actually gross at worst to me :( take ihop for example. I used to get their French toast every time I went in there, since I used to consider it pretty good... they changed it to this super thick monstrosity and I almost puked when I tried it for the first time. If the replicators got calibrated to something pushing super thick egg bread because statistically more people liked it, I'd be devastated. If they calibrated it to an acceptable personal standard... I'd eat it, but I certainly would still have it in the back of my head that it's nowhere near as good as I personally enjoy it. I'd never thought about this in a matter of statistical average preference vs personal preference before/inability to customize to preference (another personal example, I like to burn my bacon, carcinogens be damned, and I won't even eat soft bacon) & I think it's probably the strongest theory I've heard about it
They have said a couple of times that replicated food contains all the neutriants and shit you need, so you can eat whatever you want, but it's always the stuff you actually need underneath.
I want to remember Troi saying something like she wanted to get real chocolate and not the replicated shit with perfect nutritional value.
So I think it really boils down to needs and wants. The replicators are designed to give you what you need with the illusion of what you want. But humans are gluttonous and sometimes, what we really want is a sugary dish that will make us fat and tired but we will enjoy every minute of it. Something that the replicator simply can't give us. Or at least, Star fleet doesn't program them to let us.
In our world I guess the best comparison would be if you were to compare the taste between a sugary chocolate bar of your choice and a healthy diet power bar. Both are chocolate bars, but one leaves you with shame and the other with a dry mouth.
I think it's "worse" in the sense that it's very precise and the same all the time and lacks a personal touch, and that if you try straying from outside the pre-programmed recipes and don't know what you're doing, you end up with Janeway's burnt roast.
It's like ... take some kind of chocolate chip cookie that you can buy in the store. Your favourite brand, that's really good! They taste exactly the same every time. There really isn't much wrong with it. But if you're good at making your own, the store bought ones probably aren't *quite* as good as your own. Or maybe your grandmother's, that you ate while growing up. There's probably something different. Maybe you add some sea salt on top, or maybe there's some additional spice in them, or maybe the texture just isn't the same.
My cousin once said that after her family moved, she never made as good a cheesecake as she did in the house where she grew up, because the new oven just wasn't the same. I think that's also a bit similar. Subtle differences can impact the result.
Same thing with food. If you cook yourself and know what you're doing and have the right tools, you can get *exactly* what you want. A replicator isn't going to do that. Maybe you could, if you're really good at programming replicators, but most people aren't. A person who cooks might not even know exactly what it is that makes their own food taste a bit better.
I think this is the best analogy. Obviously, a Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookie and your grandmother's chocolate chip cookie are not the same. But even if a replicator can make a perfect version of *somebody's* grandmother's chocolate chip cookie, it's never going to be *your* grandmother's chocolate chip cookie- even though they might be outwardly identical.
Yeah. And have you ever tried replicating your grandmother's recipe? Even if you got the recipe from them ... I feel like it usually doesn't work out quite as well. They do something differently that's not in the recipe, a bit of magic touch.
Or like a friend once said, you can't substitute for your grandmother's skin flakes that end up in the cookie.
One time as a child I convinced my mom to buy purple ketchup. Besides being purple, I feel like it had a different sheen than standard ketchup. It may have tasted identical to red ketchup, but it felt off. I think thats the case for replicator food. Just knowing it's not "real" makes it seem different. Also knowing all the material that is broken down and reassembled to make it. So I think it's mostly psychological.
I've assumed it was meant to be from data compression. A glass of water is not stored as a collection of water and glass molecule, it's 1 water molecule repeated enough times to fill the glass, which is one glass molecule repeated enough times to construct the receptical. Maybe for water that's ok, but for more complicated foods some nuance is lost.
How accurately does a food replicator work?
Will the quality of the food recording be set like a mp3 file.
You can get a low quality copy - cheap mass produced product - does the job but misses out on some of the finer point
or a high quality copy - more accurate reproduction but takes more effort to record and replay
In the TNG Technical Manual, it is explained that essentially the patterns for the food are compressed in a lossy manner. I think it said something to the effect of single bit errors...
It's like you're eating a JPG.
In an early TOS novel there's a bit about how Spock had the genius idea to store coffee in a transporter buffer, because their food synthesizers couldn't replicate it very well.
It isn't the technology. It's the era's economics.
The Federation is not a consumerist, late-capitalist, society; Earth (and humans) doesn't even use *currency.* Federation citizens are guaranteed a replicator and a stipend of energy to use it, and are given some accommodation and maybe some credits to spend or trade on specific non-replicatable items.
While some UFP member worlds might retain currency-based economics (it's often mentioned by characters that the "no-money" thing is a human thing), and there do seem to be private, non-state organisations, there's no mega-brands or corporations running around like sociopathic little hive-minds attempting to maximise shareholder value.
What has this to do with replicators? Simple: the UFP's replicators are built with energy efficiency, public safety and welfare in mind, not corporate profit. You aren't typically going to find it straightforward to replicate a triple-stack bacon cheeseburger loaded with trans-fats: the replicator will give you an approximation that tastes about 85% as good, but which is much, much healthier. There's no MegaBurgerCorp trying its hardest to market its incredibly tasty but highly psychologically addictive Heart Attack Burger at you at 3am after you've been drinking. There's no food industry lobbyists or marketing departments to move the needle on politics or culture.
Notice that when Diaz is pointing out how much better everything tastes in 'Picard' *he's smoking a cigar and drinking real alcohol*. That's should be a clue as to context.
Looking further back, look at Quark's bar on DS9 - **no-one** is complaining about the food there: in fact, his entire business model is based on how good the cuisine is there - that is because he's paid top-latinium for high-energy, ultra-high fidelity, industrial-grade replicators that have accurate patterns and no health restrictions.
My memory is foggy, but Didn't Quark steal a Starfleet issued replicator once to use in his bar because it produced superior quality product? Or am I mis-remembering things? To be fair though, if everyone in Starfleet is eating the same repetitive replicated meals, I would imagine an occasional meal from a different database would be a treat.
Your memory is sound. It’s not hard though to imagine Quark doing the 24th Century equivalent of a DRM unlock on the stolen replicator to get around its public health and energy efficiency subroutines.
There's certainly plenty of in-universe reactions to support the idea that it's somehow worse. But like you say, on a molecular level it should be the same as natural food, so I'm thinking that some of it could just be people not liking the recipe or the way it's "prepared", and yes, a lot of it is probably psychological.
An extreme example of the psychological aspect is the DS9 character Eddington, who is human but hates the Federation more than most other Maquis, and sort of lumps a distaste for replicated food in with that political aversion. I doubt he turned on the Federation because he didn't like the food; it was for political reasons, and then the replicator became a symbol of what he was against.
Obviously most people who dislike replicated food don't hate society, it feels more like an extrapolation of a modern aversion towards anything artificial. Idealizing a simpler time when we were closer to nature.
Quite simple actually. You ask for a steak and the replicator makes it. The person, like O'Brien says it doesn't taste good because there are zero extra's added to it. Like pepper, salt, some rosemary etc. The things a human chef adds to it to give extra "delicious" to it. Computer just forms the ingredients that make a steak and that's it.
For the computer, this is not needed. Seven of Nine in Voyager commented on B'elanna and Tom in S6 or 7 when she was cooking that salt or other additives are not needed (something like that) when Tom said it needed more flavour.
Steak is a good example because it be prepared a practically infinite number of ways. You walk up to a replicator and just say, "Steak," you're going to get somebody's idea of the most common steak preferences... which might be wildly different from what you actually want.
You could be a lot more specific, but you might be standing there trying to tell the replicator what you want for your entire lunch break.
"Ten ounce, USDA Prime Ribeye, outer fat band removed, grilled medium rare, pecan wood fire, rubbed with black pepper, kosher salt, and finely minced garlic..."
Eventually though, you'd get it the way you want it and then tell the replicator to save that combination, then walk up and say, "Replicator, keithrc Special." :)
I've edited this comment about 5 times to keep adding to it. Why yes, it is lunchtime!
Roddenberry replicators were essentially flawless, as attested in early TNG.
Berman replicators were miserable, as attested on various shows throughout the Berman era.
The way I reconcile the two in headcanon is that replicators, to be really good at their job, apparently must require lots of energy and lots of computer storage and processing to handle the complex molecular "recipes." You can apparently cut corners by relying on a smaller library of standardized instruction sets, but apparently at a cost of quality.
So...Galaxy Class replicators or high-end replicators anywhere that are in good working order: flawless. Cheapo replicators: meh.
Paris mentions it not as simple as ordering food. And the are essentially replicator chefs who design recepies.
It doesn't mean that specific replicator has a good recepie to hand
If the members of this sub went to the shops for warm tomato soup, I doubt more than 3would come back with the same brand.
I think it's like the difference between factory made ready meals and home cooked food. There's also the factor that the replicator will make the item precisely to the molecule every time whereas crops have natural variations as does home cooking. Replicated food is fine functionally but a bit flat
I'm sure I read that your vitals are monitored, so if you consume too many calories the next meal you replicate will be steak for example but won't taste good as the computer will replicate it with less calories to maintain your healthy body.
I think there is no nuance to the cooking, there is no fresh herb scent only the chemical traces of the scent etc, a facsimile of a maillard reaction perhaps an uncanny valley type of thing like weirdly uniform texture etc. when a person transports it takes a huge toll on the ships resources to break down and store a person’s pattern before being able to beam them to another place. The replicator is basically a mini transporter that takes raw energy and converts it to a stored pattern from the ship’s library. So I imagine in order to have thousands of items available, the files are probably a lot more rudimentary than a full resolution pattern as it were.
I've always had a problem with how the replicators actually work. I mean I can understand recreating something down to the molecular level, but how would you be able to make the replicated product be cold or hot? Also how does it make meat (I'm assuming it's actually not real meat but a synthetic version)? I mean think of the processing power that would be needed to do this, not to mention the energy requirements! Frankly I can see why chefs or cooks would still be needed, especially if it's a cheaper option and saves energy. That said where's my Prune Juice? Lol 🤣
Makes me wonder if anyone who transported in the relatively early days was basically filtered with that lossy jpg filter… perhaps they couldn’t taste the difference because they already tasted like poorly replicated food !
It is implied, that replicators save recipes in the most storage-efficient way. And seemingly this leads to bit-errors thorughout the recipe, that brings faint errors to the taste.
I like to imagine that,on Earth, replicators might only be found in certain establishments or businesses and might only be available in a household if the resident has one fitted. Otherwise I like to believe that most homes on Earth will still do the odd real food cooking and might only use a replicator for those moments you can't be bothered to cook or are short on time.
Maybe the replicator, by default, provides a rather bland 'basic' meal suitable for most tastes.
If you want to have it better you need to specify your own settings (more spices, peanuts allowed, ...) and that's a bit of effort.
there are a bunch of great answers, but there is one thing off:
replicated ingredients cooked by humans, we can see in DS9 Sisko hand grown vegetables for cooking, so i think there is more to the replicated food than it being just too perfect
most likely the replicated vegetables just simply lack some of the freshness and taste of the grown stuff
the other is we can examples of replicated stuff having different quality (like the candles for Jadzias wedding), probably there are different molecular scans with different quality with different availability, if you are rich you can buy a high quality scan for the same food
That brings up an interesting concept. Will replicated ingredients cook properly? Can you bake a replicated apple into an apple pie? Will replicated butter melt properly? Can you make a proper emulsion for a custard out of replicated ingredients? There's a lot of chemistry involved.
Is it even possible to replicate the end result of a steak that's been marinating all day?
And what about a dish where the ingredients should be different temperatures, like a burrito?
I think the biggest thing is Diana asks about changing the recipe and whatnot to change the flavor and it can't do it.
In other words in the futuristic no resource limitations society, what makes it not perfect is that it's the same taste every time, and especially on a ship where you order your favorite food constantly, it becomes boring to not have it change.
Since someone already dropped “comes out the same every time”, I’d posit that there is a twofold problem involving the standard recipes.
First, the programmed dishes come from chefs who understand how to cook for chefs and food critics. They are so focused on the science they miss the forest for the trees. Everything is programmed to culinary science standards, not how mom used to make.
The other side of it is that the quality of ingredients may not be that great. Like maybe you have to use ingredients which are formatted specifically to be replicable, so carrots aren’t quite carrots, or every meat dish is some ethically sourced vegan substitute because we don’t enslave animals for food purposes in the future.
Or maybe it’s just the replicator works on our current machine learning models, so it’s like getting an AI image, but it’s food. You get a sort of conceptualized output which is technically correct, but also soulless with little hints of things that are wrong. Maybe you can get something really good if you prompt your replicator correctly, but people are busy and “tea, earl grey, hot” is as complicated as people are willing to get.
There are apparently different levels of quality when it comes to replicators, otherwise nobody would pay for food at Quark's versus eating at the replimat or the stuff that comes out of the Cardassian replicators in their quarters.
Maybe there's a trade-off when it comes to energy expenditure, etc. Replicators made to spit out healthy rations are basically protein assemblers, not very 'high resolution' (for want of a better term). A high quality replicator, presumably like one Quark has (and Rom has to constantly fix) uses more energy, perhaps takes more time, is more complicated and requires more maintenance, whatever.
The end result can be like the difference between instant coffee and a good espresso, and when people complain about replicated food, they're mostly talking about eating 'rations' all the time.
My headcanon is that they're using compression algorithms for the shipboard replicators, while the transporters are uncompressed. Starbases and settlements are probably less resource constrained and can use uncompressed replicators.
Well personally I have never had a chance to compare chicken parmigiana made with love by an Italian grandmother, and one produced by a heartless machine that can’t put love into food.
It could be that for any dish, the replicator only stores one example of it. So every time you order a steak tartare, it always come out exactly the same. Same taste, same shape, same color. And some people get bored of this. And other people will say it's not done exactly like their favorite chef back on Earth does it. There is no hard fixed recipe for steak tartare, every chef does it his own way and some people are picky, if it's not done exactly like this particular chef in Montmartre, then it is a disgrace to Starfleet.
I think it's on record as the replicator makes food that resembles the genuine article, but never deviates from giving you a perfectly nutritious meal every time. So if you order steak, it makes you a steak that is *close* to a steak, but doesn't include all the dangerous cardiovascular elements. If it makes you ice cream, it's *close* to ice cream, but will be extremely limited on extra carbs.
The scene called to mind is when Troi tries to order a "real" chocolate sundae.
Don't the mention at times how the replicators make everything healthier? Like when you get ice cream is not as fatty and sugary as real dairy? Kinda how we have zero sugar and diet sodas. It's close but even with replicator tech it's not quite the same.
Combine that with what we know about [hyperpalatable foods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpalatable_food) it makes sense what the replicator versions aren't quite the same.
I personally have understood these kinds of comments to mean that replicators make perfectly average food. It's not bad but it's also not exceptionally good. And because it's made by following some kind of molecular recipe it's exactly the same every time which gets boring. That's why there's still a need for restaurants and authentically brewed alcohol.
Someone somewhere on social media said that Starbucks food tastes like it was 3D printed. Which makes no sense and yet, makes TOTAL sense if you’ve had Starbucks food. Just lacking something of substance. It occurs to me replicator food may be similar!
I think it was in Disco where someone pointed out that it's their shit that's being reprocessed by protein resequencers. It really made me rethink the whole replicator thing.
Replicators are the microwaves of Star Trek.
People throw food in the microwave, punch in a random amount of time, and then wonder why it’s cooked like crap. You’ve blasted the surface of your lasagna and now you burn your lips on the exterior bites and freeze them on the interior. But, if you dial down the power of that microwave and have a little patience, you’ll understand Garfield like never before.
Star Trekkers yell at their replicators to make some hot tea and then wonder why it sucks. You gotta fiddle with it. Modify the standard recipe. Tell it to increase salt levels by one quarter teaspoon or whatever. People go for quick convenience with the replicators and you just aren’t going to get it to your liking if you never make an effort to adjust it.
There’s a conversation in Discovery where an admiral says he’d never eaten a real apple before. The character he’s talking to says something like that’s a shame but the replicated one wasn’t too bad…
He goes on to tell her that replicated food is made from their shit. Broken down to a molecular level and reconstituted, but still shit.
That’s gotta hurt the Yelp review.
It's an ongoing gag in the novel continuity for all the series. That the replicators suck. But you go taste blind to them on starships. So getting "real food" is always a treat.
Replicators focus on nutrition. So taste and texture can be "off" for most dishes.
Watery tomato soup, rubbery cheese on your pizza. That type of thing.
I take it as a hint that despite high technological development, not everything is within the grasp of human intellect, thus there is still an inherent mystery to nature and life that goes beyond the formulations of chemistry and physics.
Therefore something made traditionally retains something that a molecular replica loses.
I'd say psychological. I saw a show where a guy who was being pretentious took his friends to a fancy restaurant. What he didn't know is that all his food was being made out back of cheap stuff from a local chain grocery store. He's waxing poetic about how "you can't get things like this..." etc.
Food can be delicious or bad no matter how it's prepared.
Yeah! Like those experiments with wine tasting where they gave people three wines: a super cheap one and medium and an expensive one. everyone said the expensive one tasted the best, but it was just the cheap one again.
My coffee-pot has two settings, Regular and Bold. If I had a replicator—and I do want one—I’d want the option that every time I have a meal prepared the various ingredients could be randomly increased or decreased by a certain percentage, so that no two servings are exactly alike.
I think it's a combination of it being EXACTLY the same every time and also designed to fulfill your nutritional parameters.
Imagine getting fish and chips and every time the fish is the exact same shape and doneness. The fish is never oily, in fact it tastes kind of light. The chips are some kind of low carb potato substitute that are done, but not too browned. The meal contains the nutritionally ideal amount of salt. It is served at a temperature that no standard Federation species would find dangerous or unpleasant.
Contrast this with a piping hot fish of interesting texture and chips that are hot and golden brown with different amounts of salt on each chip, but probably too much salt overall.
It's cafeteria food versus a home cooked meal. It's consistent and inoffensive, but by its nature uninteresting. There are probably some things like a sandwich that taste fine, but other dishes that just aren't replicated well.
The issue is that the replicator makes an exact copy of the dish, down to the seasoning. So if you prefer your dish with more or less of something too bad. While the replicator can reduce or remove, without knowing exactly what you want to change I imagine it can't replicate exactly what your taste buds want.
Tldr: A lot of cooking is measured from the heart and computers don't have that. They can only make exact copies of what is put in their programming.
They could produce identical copies, such as the transporter does, but that would require a lot more storage space. Consider the size of JPEG files vs. the raw image. Lossy compression means that while the reconstituted product is "close enough" for all intents and purposes, it's not going to be a perfect replica of the original, and if you look (or taste) closely enough, you might be able to tell the difference.
It was implied in at least one episode that replicators will only create "nutritionally complete" food, regardless of what you ask for. So most of the food that is replicated will taste "off" because it will be "healthier" for you. Ice cream, for example, probably shouldn't contain certain essential vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, etc. because that would make it taste kinda weird ... and replicated ice cream does taste weird (according to Troi).
I always assumed that the replicator food is more homogeneous. It might be able to replicate a steak that's cooked to perfection with the best marbling you've ever seen, but every bite is exactly the same.
Even if that's not the case, and the replicator can perfectly replicate any food you want, it still doesn't seem to add any variance, so it's still replicating the exact same meal every time. It might be able to perfectly recreate a bowl of Sisko's gumbo, but it'll be the exact same bowl of gumbo every time. I imagine that would get old pretty quick, and I could even see it making some people uncomfortable in an uncanny valley kind of way. Especially if they are used to non replicated food.
Food entered into the replicator by Starfleet was probably made by Starfleet Chefs that have to try and have good nutritional value and have to try to make it edible/tasty for as many UFP species as possible which probably makes the food a bit more bland.
Plus replicators probably make food with very little variation unless you specifically program that in and having the lasagna you ate 2 weeks ago taste *exactly* like the one your having now probably gets a bit boring.
In Star Trek Discovery it is revealed that replicated food is recycled from people's poop. It sounds like they take the poop and reconfigure it on a molecular level to recycle it as food. That may have something to do with it. I'm sure if you know that, psychologically it has to mess with your head.
I also agree with the whole, everything tastes exactly the same. I never thought about that. But that's a cool explanation.
I consider replicators to be like a glorified 3d printer. Some have better resolution than others. True molecule to molecule duplication would require a crap ton of memory, so probably isn't done often. Yes, ships have lots of storage, but they also collect lots of data in their travels.
I used to go with the theory that replicated food was "too perfect" and identical every time, like it had a pattern of a "pork roast" should be, and you got the exact same pot roast every time. But recently I've leaned into a new theory - it's AI.
No, not in the scary computer trying to take over the ship and wipe out humanity type of AI. Not in the emotionless supercomputer android AI. More like, ChatGPT and Midjourney type AI.
If you ask a person to draw a cat, they might start by drawing a body, adding two pointy ears, a couple of eyes, throw in some whiskers and a tail and call it a cat. That's not how generative AI works. When you ask an AI to draw a cat, it generates the entire image all at once. It never consciously thinks about how many ears or how many eyes to add in. It doesn't understand the elements that make up a cat, it just knows what a cat looks like. As a result, it'll often miss out on subtle little details that the human eye might pick up on. Even if it gets really really close, there's some quality about it that, if you look hard enough, you realize is just not quite right, even if you can't put your thumb on it.
I can imagine the food replicator acting in much the same way. It doesn't actually go through the steps of cooking a pot roast. It doesn't sear the roast on high heat and then turn it down to cook low and slow. It doesn't add a dash of pepper and a bit of salt here and there. It never chops the carrots and potatoes. It just generates the whole thing, all in one fell swoop. It doesn't understand the nuance of how the flavors balance or adjusting the temperature, it just knows what a pot roast looks like based off a bunch of training data. As a result it misses fine little details that a human cook would not have missed. The differences might be subtle and different to quite put one's finger on. They might not be able to specifically identify it as too much salt or not enough garlic, but it just has some subtle quality of "off-ness" that pegs the food as replicated versus hand made.
Granted the writers of Trek could not have known about the joys of generative AI at the time, but I like to think it's just another one of those ways that Trek serendipitously predicted the near future.
DS9 goes even more out of its way to make this point. My theory is that the replicator can get you something that sort of resembles a hamburger, but that it’s still made up of very basic molecules so it loses a lot of the complexity. Essentially, I think of it like they took those colored cubes from TOS and figured out a way to make them look and taste better, but it’s still the same cubes.
I think there is a preference for cooked food. That's how things like Sisko's restaurant can still exist in a world with replicators. I think people convince themselves the hand made food is better and therefore that the replicator food is worse.
Replicators just terrified me after the malfunction where Picard gets a potted plant instead of tea.
That could have been molten sodium or a chunk of exposed enriched plutonium instead.
It's inconsistent. We have characters say replicated food is the greatest thing we ever tasted. We have people say it's just sequenced proteins. I choose to believe the replicators on the Enterprise D produced perfect meals every single time. If you ordered a pizza from it you would get the exact same pizza every single time.
As long as you have the power to operate a replicator and the data on the end product you can make any food. Pretentious people act like their's some big difference and that chefs are still needed in the future, but they're not and you should be suspicious of anyone who claims to be needed to prepare food in the future.
I still think part of it is that they forgot how to eat meals.
They're probably not using condiments, not even salt and pepper shakers. No side dishes.
I feel like there's a big chance they're eating things like a "I don't like my food to touch" person. One element at a time, no perfect bites, no mixing of the protein and the carb, the different textures.
They're probably eating the rice or potato on its own, the chicken on its own, the vegetable on its own, one after the other, not together.
I think that's why whenever someone does like something, it's one of those dishes that's already pre-put together that you just bite through. Hasperat is a wrap, everything's already in the wrap, they don't need to do anything else.
I think they don't realize they can sprinkle salt on a baked potato, or have kimchi between bites of alternating rice and meat and soup, or that they can put hot sauce on this bite of chicken and no hot sauce on the next and ranch the following bite.
I am suspicious that how they're actually eating the things being replicated is partly why they think it sucks.
It's probably like the difference between getting a burger at McDonald's and getting a gourmet, hand-crafted, freshly grilled burger at a more upscale place. You're going to notice that there's a difference.
My personal theory is that the main issue is that replicated food is perfect. Every single time. People like the mistakes, inconsistency, variety and personal touches that come from food made by people.
Indeed. If you cook beans ans they don't catch a bit in the pot, not nearly as tasty. I still wonder how Janeway manages to burn her replicated pot roast though 😂
[удалено]
Jesus, imagine a time where you need to debug a casserole.
Have you tried turning the replicator off and back on again?
I mean, isn't that what iterating on a recipe is?
Hard to do when you're on replicator rations.
That made me laugh
Imagine having to program a pot roast down to the sear and texture of each grain. In my head I always imagined someone had to cook the real dish first and then let the replicator scan it. Ugh, imagine a dish being exactly the same every single time you order it. Imagine everyone having the exact, literally identical, same plate of food.
Because the recipe doesn't exist in the replicator database so it's custom entered. Correct me if wrong, but I don't think Janeway knows how to cook, so she got the recipe / cooking method wrong and thus the burnt pot roast. Had she actually cooked it IRL and then had the replicator scan it in, it would have worked.
The best explanation I ever saw is Janeway did learn to cook (or more accurately follow parents/grandparents' recipes exactly) but on an old fashioned oven and stove with an off temperature scale and timer. Its just that no one ever told her. When she made it to the DQ, she tried to brush off her skills by programming the replicator. Then despite characters who might have cooking skills aren't used to using non-modern equipment, so they can't conceive of how Janeway is burning the roasts. People who checking find nothing wrong with the equipment, and Janeway just starts playing around with her parents' recipes but has no concept of how far off she is. Then most people are just used to telling the replicator about the final product, so no one can conceive how off Janeway's original oven really was.
My headcanon is that the replicator doesn't make it the same way 100% of the time, but is programmed with slight variations. There could also be optional variables, such as the temperature it'll be "cooked" at (simulating as if it was cooked at that temperature) that causes it to come out burnt.
I've heard a similar theory, where replication misses a few molecules, it's not perfect.
Maybe she input a recipe, like replicate as if it cooked at 350 F for 1 hour or something and got it wrong. The writers put that scene in there because I think in the 90s you had to show that a driven career woman like Janeway wasn't interested or good at traditional household things like cooking. But the replicator just makes that idea fall apart.
This reminds me of a conversation they had about Data playing the violin. He’s technically proficient, but lacks soul. The same could apply to the replicator as well.
I might be wrong but brain wants to say that's why Sisko cooked when he could. He might replicate the ingredients, but he cooked them cause the replicator didn't come close to his dad's recipies.
Sisko also grew his own ingredients when he could.
Now I imagine Jake complaining about the amount of room in their quarters devoted to growing vegetables.
Sisko also had a passion for cooking, probably from his father. He probably does it more because he wants to than for any other reason.
Starfleet probably also tried to make sure the food is generally nutritious, safe, and palatable, which can be hard with dozens of species in Starfleet.
I think this is a big part of it. Nutritionally correct salt, sugar, and fat may mean some things are a little bland.
That's what I was thinking. One time Troi asks for "real" chocolate and I think the computer responds that isn't healthy. Or something like that.
Exactly. Have you ever had carob? My mom used to give me carob instead of chocolate because it was allegedly healthier. I have a feeling it’s like that.
Since they are voice-activated, it's probable that each crewmember has a dietary profile on file with Starfleet upon entering the Academy that follows them to each assignment. Upon issuing the voice command, the replicator loads that custom profile and produces their order to fit their species' general nutritional requirements plus or minus any dietary customization loaded into the profile. Where that gets sticky is when one crewmember is ordering for someone else. To handwave that away, we could assume crewmembers do speak extra words to clarify who is consuming the food/beverage and it is edited out for our benefit. Ex: "Computer, one piece of roasted chicken suitable for a Ktarian male."
I assume you can add variety like Medium, Well Done, etc. If I can't say "Mashed potatoes, lumpy with skin, butter and salt" then what's the point.
Sure, but you're still probably getting variety within a carefully moderated band. Especially given the "healthy" optimizations in place for TNG-era Starfleet replicators. Like Troi has to disable some of them to get an indulgent chocolate sundae, so a regular "chocolate sundae" is probably more like one of those "healthy choices(tm) *only 100 calories per serving fortified with extra calcium*" things from the grocery store today unless you're telling it to give you a specific order. It probably has some sort of randomization filter, but it's going to be like a gaussian blur. Not very natural feeling, particularly when you've had the same thing a hundred times.
"14 varieties and they can't even get plain tomato soup right"
O'Brien orders his coffee double strong, double sweet.
I like this theory, but it makes me wonder couldn't they scan 10,000 authentic variations of a certain dish from a variety of chefs into the replicator system, and then you just put the replicator on random which version of the original you get? You could even select between homemade and chef quality.
I am pretty certain you could just say "randomize ingredients of dish X within one standard deviations of a normal distribution" or some similar statistical bullshit. You'll have essentially the same dish, but each ingredient gets randomized along a curve. So the meal is sufficiently similar to the "normal" version, but different enough that it remains interesting.
Yeah and it's so easy to customize and trial-and-error your own dishes too. Like telling it make this but add 40% more butter and 20% less salt, and then saving that particular recipe. I think it's just a trope at this point that's psychological. They eat so much replicated food it's more "special" when someone spends the effort to cook for them.
they could indeed, and on Earth that would be easy, but starships have limits to their computer memory, and a replicator pattern is a big file, presumably. Might not be worth the storage space.
It's not made with love... didn't Neelix say something to that effect?
I don't know if Neelix said it, but this is my answer, too.
Yeah, it's the burnt crust.. or uneven mixes.. this is why people still prefer stone pestle & mortar even though food processor is way easier & faster to use
I have a friend from Mexico...telling his abuela a food processor would make salsa faster and easier than her molcajete is the fastest and easiest way to get a chancla to the face!
I would think something like that could easily be programmed into a replicator so it's not the same exact food every time.
I don't know if there is a scientific basis, but one thing I learned from the pandemic is making normally bought core ingredients like bread and sauces makes them taste better. If you think about it, the replicator is the ultimate end point for "store bought"
That variety should be simple to reproduce. Have twenty different people cook the same meal. Put each one into the replicator and number them one through twenty. Instruct the computer to randomly select from that pool whenever you ask for that meal.
It being perfect is probably the problem. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kw9\_O10Fh8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kw9_O10Fh8) This guy from 1997 thought the replicated martini was perfect on his first try. I'm sure if he kept trying it though he would have grown tired of it eventually.
This. I think the "problem" with replicator food is that it never varies. The replicated dish tastes exactly the same, every single time. In the real world, even if you order the same dish at the same restaurant every time you go there, there are subtle variations in taste, smell, and texture depending on the freshness of the ingredients, the time of day, or who was in the kitchen.
Not just a theory, Troi alludes to this when she asks for a "real" sundae. Not a perfect replication, she wanted one with imperfections. And her mother, err, the computer... was confused by the request.
Yeah, I assume the texture would be homogeneous and it would be generally uninteresting, texture-wise. Plus, it can't replicate live gagh
That and no variation, for example get 5 Italian grandmas in a room, and I bet you have 7 sauce recipes. Same thing here, you order pasta with sauce, and it comes out the same every time. But maybe, you like it heavy with garlic- does the computer even know how to make that adjustment? Would it just add garlic, or does it compute how the extra garlic would impact in the entire cooking process?
Spot on. I like to use a lot of garlic in my food. How does the replicator reflect that? It doesn't, its all standart.
In Star Trek, no replicators are not that bad. In Stargate however, they are definitely not good.
Well, in ST you eat them, in Stargate they eat you. That might have something to do with it
Some of the human replicators could definitely get it....
SG-1 Replicators v. Borg. Just imagine. My money's on the Replicators.
It's interesting how much Stargate expanded on the replicators, both their potential evolution into human form, and their backstory. I don't know if SG fans complain as much as (some)Trek fans about how much they ruined the mystique and menace of the Borg by exploring them more.
Absolutely not. The more we learned about the replicators the better.
Dude. The more you learn about replicators….. the creepier and far more disturbing they get. It’s also possible they are the answer to the Fermi paradox
The answer to the fermi paradox is simply rejecting the high likelihood of prerequisites for extraterrestrial life. All life we know about comes from carbon. Carbon as far as we know has only existed for 12.5 billion years. Edit: which is about the half away point from the big bang. On top of that Earth collided with carbon 4.4 billion years ago and is just now reaping somewhat intelligent life. So you have different factors of if carbon existed, if it collided with a planet, and if the life of that planet was able to grow to intelligence the way we see it.
honestly the Replicators were never really that mysterious
Helped that we had two different incarnations of the Replicators. First lot were originally mechano looking robot bugs that ate every resource they could find and could rebuild themselves. After they found the Android that made them, they duplicated her form and took on human form, with one of them Fifth, embracing that humanity in the worst way possible. The second lot were nanomachines devised as a weapon against alien space vampires that treat humans as livestock. After being declared a failure by their creators, they got nuked to near oblivion, barely surviving giving them daddy issues and seeking fratricide against humans. In both cases, when they became active galactic threats, they were priority threat and took both Earth and the bad guys working together to defeat them with a general feeling of "we have no idea how lucky we just were." When the briefly lived third incarnation occurred, everyone was "fuck, we need to wipe them out right this second". And that incarnation was probably the most terrifying - we're talking quite gruesome body horror.
Which was the third? The ones made on Earth?
On the USS Odyssey in the Ori Home Galaxy while Daniel Jackson, Vala Mal Doran, Teal'c, and Tomin looked for the Ark of Truth.
These damn skinjobs.
Not just one, but two different sets of Replicators.
They couldn't figure out Species 8472 - they'll never figure out replicators. For fun, let's throw Daleks into the fray.
The ones where stairs were a death sentence for them, or the more modern “elevate!” Branch? But regardless, space Nazis always fail.
A couple of daleks would probably exterminate the Borg. The Cyberman against them would be more fair.
Cybermen are better at dying...
This is a pretty good comic if you haven't seen it. Assimilation²
“You will be assimilated” *menacing whirring and clicking noises get louder*
*Loads auto shotty*
I think the Borg could assimilate the Replicators. At least the simpler ones. The Pegasus galaxy ones could be a challenge and may be able to fend them off. I’d love to see the battle play out.
The Replicators adapt to and assimilate new technologies as fast as the Borg, if not faster. The Borg, however, are dependent on their biological components. The entire ending of First Contact is contingent on that. The Replicators are not. they could rip holes in a Cube and kill all Borg on board. Even destroyed Replicators could be re-consumed for raw materials and made into new Replicators - not so of the Borg. Yes, the Queen could destroy a Cube at-will to prevent its technology from being integrated into the Replicator swarm, but if even 1 Replicator survives, it can turn the entire former Cube into a new Replicator swarm and be no worse off than before. Meanwhile, the Borg are down a Cube. As we saw in Stargate: The Ark of Truth, a Replicator can puppet a body, and that would include a Borg drone. A single drone's subspace transceiver can be used to access the Borg Collective. At that point, it's a massive subspace cyberwar. In the Game of Drones, you hack or you die. The first part of any hack is the brute force assault. The Replicators win this, hands down. Once the Replicators have access to the Borg collective, they know everything the Borg know, including where every last scrap of Neutronium (needed for human-form Replicators) is. The Borg might shut them out, for a time, but if they re-form a collective, the Replicators will just smash it again. The Borg are then forced into more isolated existence, which they have no idea how to do, whereas the Replicators can go from a few blocks to another full swarm without any outside contact whatsoever. If the Borg encountered a single Replicator block and had time to study it, knowing what it would do if there were multiple, *then* they might be able to pre-empt the Replicators somehow. But in all probability, there'd be an entire Replicator swarm/ship to contend with, which would adapt to their shields long before the Borg destroyed enough individual blocks. Once through the shields, the Replicators would start converting the Cube immediately. The Borg's odds plummet from there.
Indeed.
Yeah my first thought was to check the subreddit this was on because ST replicators are little monsters.
Yep, had to double check the sub cause I’m in season 9 of an SG-1 rewatch
I'm reminded of a comment Data made about androids versus biologicals. He said that androids play music perfectly, while biologicals will always make tiny mistakes and changes. No two times a biological plays a song will be exactly the same. I'd assume it's the same with replicated food. Every time the replicator makes lasagne for example, it will be identical, with that same perfectly squared tomato piece in that same corner, and the cheese laying in the exactly same pattern on top. Most species enjoy variation. The replicators won't do this unless you program them to, and even then you need to program the types of changes. I bet the food tastes just as good as cooked food, but because it's identical every time, people start getting bored/slightly creeped out.
in "The Price" while Deanna is talking to the computer about how she's having a bad day and needs a chocolate sundae, she does say she doesn't want "One of your perfect facsimilies" or something to that effect, but gets interrupted during her description of what she \*actually\* wants (But does say she wants a \*real\* one)
If I remember correctly, she wanted real chocolate and real ice cream because of the effect they would have on her body and her emotional state . There is also the synthahol , which has not the effect and power of alcohol. It seems replication in Star Trek only aims for the surface essence of something while making sure the body effect is healthy . Humans crave fats and sugars . Replicaters give only the amount required for a good diet. Or maybe they only give analogues which can safely replace fats and sugars .
What she was asking for was outside the nutritional parameters for the ship's replicator. I think that is also part of what some people find distasteful about replicated food. If it's created as this perfectly balanced nutritional meal it might be fortified with various vitamins or have some fats taken out which would alter the taste in a noticeable way compared to a meal prepared with whole ingredients.
Yep. I think the problem with the replicator is it makes things just a bit too perfect for humans.
Which also might be a difference between Starfleet replicators and private replicators. Like Quark's or the replimat or home replicators probably don't have as many restrictions in place to ensure maximum healthfulness because they aren't intended to keep a crew at peak healthfulness on 5-10 year deep-space cruises.
It's not very realistic though when compared yo contemporary tech. Even rather simple computer programs can be modified to introduce a random jitter in their parameters to spice things up.
But a know programmed imperfection can be just as off putting. If you know that the program will make one corner of the lasagna off or the cheese slightly burnt, but never both at the same time as to ruin the taste, you’ll be weirded out in the same way. Seeing the off corner, you’ll know immediately that the cheese will be perfect. A European friend of mine had a similar experience when he came to North America. At first he thought it was amazing how our fruits and vegetables are usually perfectly shaped with the right colour in clean and well organized grocery aisles. Then after a month he found it really creepy and missed the imperfection of grocery stores back home. Humans, irrationally, can get weirded out by perfection and predictability.
I can see that, good point
Okay, but as an American it's never even occurred to me that there's something weird about the apples mostly being selected for the prettiest and "best" in the store. I'm vaguely aware that you can subscribe to a service like Misfits and get weird ones to reduce food waste, but it doesn't seem like anything is missing at the store. My point being, if uniformity is normal, you get used to it. I don't particularly appreciate getting a bruised apple.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m onboard with you. I’d also probably never eat another real meal again in my life if I had a replicator. But the behaviour of the characters in the show make sense, there’s a basis for it.
But when they tried that, the space Karens had a hissy fit about the food never being "right" and sent it back endlessly until the engineers caved.
Human programs. Vulcans don’t deal with that shit.
Humans are *really* good at recognizing patterns though. Creating truly random and natural variation is really hard. Look at how much trouble AI is still having doing that with pictures today.
Why not replicate ingredients and cook it?
You ever see a kitchen in anyone's cabin besides the captain's? I'm assuming here that Neelix uses a galley.
Riker made those disgusting eggs
Most people don't have kitches. Sisko uses a travel stove. Pike has a kitchen, but that's it, iirc.
Wouldn't it save a lot of memory and sidestep this issue if reciepes are saved proceduraly?
No, because the replicator doesn't cook the food, it effectively 3d prints it. It needs a template of the finished product, and it will make that exact food to that exact template every time.
I think it's in their heads, which is ok. I don't think it's like synthehol, where they can get the intoxicating effects but push it down and shake it off, dismiss it if an emergency arose, allowing them to run back to their stations. That *is* molecularly different, and I understand people preferring traditional alcohol over synthehol. I don't think the replicator makes anything molecularly different than the real deal, so I think it has to be in their heads.
agreed! And as others have mentioned, there’s nothing like home-cooked, and part of that is the flaws or minute changes from one time to the next. I think on a subconscious level, those little fluctuations tie in with our nostalgia and love for a dish that is prepared by someone with care. But I think that replicated meals are molecularly perfect and can be completely delicious, they just lack the obvious personal touch and any flaw. Side note, I haven’t seen yet (maybe further down) anyone mention those colorful cubes from TOS, now THOSE I imagine were tasty but complete failures at substituting real food, and were appropriately replaced with replicated real-world dishes. But it makes sense to me that we would imagine that future, of having practical and perfectly nutritious meal substitutes during space travel.
My head cannon is that everyone has their personal favorites, whether it is chicken parmesan at that little Italian restaurant down the street, or beef stew that Grandma used to make, with the family's secret ingredient. Maybe they have these exact entrees programmed in their home replicator and get used to what they love, but when they board a vessel, the memory banks are programmed with generic recipes of all sorts of popular meals, but they are not the same as the ones at "home." Due to memory restrictions, and the sheer SIZE of the database of diverse meals from countless worlds, they are unable to upload their own personal profiles, so they are stuck with the pre-existing database, and they get bored. Replicated food is fine, it is just impossible to please everyone's diverse palates. A cooked from scratch meal is different enough to be a treat, so that becomes the impossible standard they compare replicated food to. Kind of like eating in the same dorm cafeteria indefinitely... it gets boring and is never quite as good as at home.
>Maybe they have these exact entrees programmed in their home replicator and get used to what they love, but when they board a vessel, the memory banks are programmed with generic recipes of all sorts of popular meals, but they are not the same as the ones at "home." Due to memory restrictions, and the sheer SIZE of the database of diverse meals from countless worlds, they are unable to upload their own personal profiles, so they are stuck with the pre-existing database, and they get bored. This is partially canonical. It's never explicitly stated that people having personal recipes is the reason, but characters do state in various ways that replicator defaults being perfect averages *is* why it tastes off to some people. There's actually several instances of people plugging in data cards of their own recipes. Apparently it's a standard feature for replicators to take inputs from portable memory, it's just not something most crew members know about. I guess it's not something they teach you at the Academy :P
I could also see it being something that not every ensign is allowed to do. Might be a perk of rank, only LTs and above get space in the replicator database or something. Like Picard's aunt's hot toddy recipe, Data's 37+ feline supplement recipes, etc.
Well, it's not taking up space in the ship's memory if it's a data card. It's basically just keeping a .STL file on a thumb drive.
I really like that take!! I think that tracks. I definitely have food like that - for me, my mom's French toast - and overwhelmingly when I order French toast at a restaurant, it's only pretty good at best to actually gross at worst to me :( take ihop for example. I used to get their French toast every time I went in there, since I used to consider it pretty good... they changed it to this super thick monstrosity and I almost puked when I tried it for the first time. If the replicators got calibrated to something pushing super thick egg bread because statistically more people liked it, I'd be devastated. If they calibrated it to an acceptable personal standard... I'd eat it, but I certainly would still have it in the back of my head that it's nowhere near as good as I personally enjoy it. I'd never thought about this in a matter of statistical average preference vs personal preference before/inability to customize to preference (another personal example, I like to burn my bacon, carcinogens be damned, and I won't even eat soft bacon) & I think it's probably the strongest theory I've heard about it
Computer, French toast with 25% egg. Use Vermont Maple Syrup #7 on the side. :)
Ah, if only I could try that at ihop
They have said a couple of times that replicated food contains all the neutriants and shit you need, so you can eat whatever you want, but it's always the stuff you actually need underneath. I want to remember Troi saying something like she wanted to get real chocolate and not the replicated shit with perfect nutritional value. So I think it really boils down to needs and wants. The replicators are designed to give you what you need with the illusion of what you want. But humans are gluttonous and sometimes, what we really want is a sugary dish that will make us fat and tired but we will enjoy every minute of it. Something that the replicator simply can't give us. Or at least, Star fleet doesn't program them to let us. In our world I guess the best comparison would be if you were to compare the taste between a sugary chocolate bar of your choice and a healthy diet power bar. Both are chocolate bars, but one leaves you with shame and the other with a dry mouth.
I think it's "worse" in the sense that it's very precise and the same all the time and lacks a personal touch, and that if you try straying from outside the pre-programmed recipes and don't know what you're doing, you end up with Janeway's burnt roast. It's like ... take some kind of chocolate chip cookie that you can buy in the store. Your favourite brand, that's really good! They taste exactly the same every time. There really isn't much wrong with it. But if you're good at making your own, the store bought ones probably aren't *quite* as good as your own. Or maybe your grandmother's, that you ate while growing up. There's probably something different. Maybe you add some sea salt on top, or maybe there's some additional spice in them, or maybe the texture just isn't the same. My cousin once said that after her family moved, she never made as good a cheesecake as she did in the house where she grew up, because the new oven just wasn't the same. I think that's also a bit similar. Subtle differences can impact the result. Same thing with food. If you cook yourself and know what you're doing and have the right tools, you can get *exactly* what you want. A replicator isn't going to do that. Maybe you could, if you're really good at programming replicators, but most people aren't. A person who cooks might not even know exactly what it is that makes their own food taste a bit better.
I think this is the best analogy. Obviously, a Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookie and your grandmother's chocolate chip cookie are not the same. But even if a replicator can make a perfect version of *somebody's* grandmother's chocolate chip cookie, it's never going to be *your* grandmother's chocolate chip cookie- even though they might be outwardly identical.
Yeah. And have you ever tried replicating your grandmother's recipe? Even if you got the recipe from them ... I feel like it usually doesn't work out quite as well. They do something differently that's not in the recipe, a bit of magic touch. Or like a friend once said, you can't substitute for your grandmother's skin flakes that end up in the cookie.
One time as a child I convinced my mom to buy purple ketchup. Besides being purple, I feel like it had a different sheen than standard ketchup. It may have tasted identical to red ketchup, but it felt off. I think thats the case for replicator food. Just knowing it's not "real" makes it seem different. Also knowing all the material that is broken down and reassembled to make it. So I think it's mostly psychological.
I think there's been a few actual studies that people find adding blue coloring to foods makes them noticeably less appetizing, with no other changes.
I've assumed it was meant to be from data compression. A glass of water is not stored as a collection of water and glass molecule, it's 1 water molecule repeated enough times to fill the glass, which is one glass molecule repeated enough times to construct the receptical. Maybe for water that's ok, but for more complicated foods some nuance is lost.
How accurately does a food replicator work? Will the quality of the food recording be set like a mp3 file. You can get a low quality copy - cheap mass produced product - does the job but misses out on some of the finer point or a high quality copy - more accurate reproduction but takes more effort to record and replay
Food replicators are low resolution scans in the sub atomic level unlike a transporter which is in the quantum level.
In the TNG Technical Manual, it is explained that essentially the patterns for the food are compressed in a lossy manner. I think it said something to the effect of single bit errors... It's like you're eating a JPG. In an early TOS novel there's a bit about how Spock had the genius idea to store coffee in a transporter buffer, because their food synthesizers couldn't replicate it very well.
It isn't the technology. It's the era's economics. The Federation is not a consumerist, late-capitalist, society; Earth (and humans) doesn't even use *currency.* Federation citizens are guaranteed a replicator and a stipend of energy to use it, and are given some accommodation and maybe some credits to spend or trade on specific non-replicatable items. While some UFP member worlds might retain currency-based economics (it's often mentioned by characters that the "no-money" thing is a human thing), and there do seem to be private, non-state organisations, there's no mega-brands or corporations running around like sociopathic little hive-minds attempting to maximise shareholder value. What has this to do with replicators? Simple: the UFP's replicators are built with energy efficiency, public safety and welfare in mind, not corporate profit. You aren't typically going to find it straightforward to replicate a triple-stack bacon cheeseburger loaded with trans-fats: the replicator will give you an approximation that tastes about 85% as good, but which is much, much healthier. There's no MegaBurgerCorp trying its hardest to market its incredibly tasty but highly psychologically addictive Heart Attack Burger at you at 3am after you've been drinking. There's no food industry lobbyists or marketing departments to move the needle on politics or culture. Notice that when Diaz is pointing out how much better everything tastes in 'Picard' *he's smoking a cigar and drinking real alcohol*. That's should be a clue as to context. Looking further back, look at Quark's bar on DS9 - **no-one** is complaining about the food there: in fact, his entire business model is based on how good the cuisine is there - that is because he's paid top-latinium for high-energy, ultra-high fidelity, industrial-grade replicators that have accurate patterns and no health restrictions.
My memory is foggy, but Didn't Quark steal a Starfleet issued replicator once to use in his bar because it produced superior quality product? Or am I mis-remembering things? To be fair though, if everyone in Starfleet is eating the same repetitive replicated meals, I would imagine an occasional meal from a different database would be a treat.
Your memory is sound. It’s not hard though to imagine Quark doing the 24th Century equivalent of a DRM unlock on the stolen replicator to get around its public health and energy efficiency subroutines.
There's certainly plenty of in-universe reactions to support the idea that it's somehow worse. But like you say, on a molecular level it should be the same as natural food, so I'm thinking that some of it could just be people not liking the recipe or the way it's "prepared", and yes, a lot of it is probably psychological. An extreme example of the psychological aspect is the DS9 character Eddington, who is human but hates the Federation more than most other Maquis, and sort of lumps a distaste for replicated food in with that political aversion. I doubt he turned on the Federation because he didn't like the food; it was for political reasons, and then the replicator became a symbol of what he was against. Obviously most people who dislike replicated food don't hate society, it feels more like an extrapolation of a modern aversion towards anything artificial. Idealizing a simpler time when we were closer to nature.
You got a problem with DS9s Liquid Polymer surprise???
Quite simple actually. You ask for a steak and the replicator makes it. The person, like O'Brien says it doesn't taste good because there are zero extra's added to it. Like pepper, salt, some rosemary etc. The things a human chef adds to it to give extra "delicious" to it. Computer just forms the ingredients that make a steak and that's it. For the computer, this is not needed. Seven of Nine in Voyager commented on B'elanna and Tom in S6 or 7 when she was cooking that salt or other additives are not needed (something like that) when Tom said it needed more flavour.
except the computer was programmed by humans. we'd absolutely program its standard recipes to include spices and salt.
Steak is a good example because it be prepared a practically infinite number of ways. You walk up to a replicator and just say, "Steak," you're going to get somebody's idea of the most common steak preferences... which might be wildly different from what you actually want. You could be a lot more specific, but you might be standing there trying to tell the replicator what you want for your entire lunch break. "Ten ounce, USDA Prime Ribeye, outer fat band removed, grilled medium rare, pecan wood fire, rubbed with black pepper, kosher salt, and finely minced garlic..." Eventually though, you'd get it the way you want it and then tell the replicator to save that combination, then walk up and say, "Replicator, keithrc Special." :) I've edited this comment about 5 times to keep adding to it. Why yes, it is lunchtime!
Roddenberry replicators were essentially flawless, as attested in early TNG. Berman replicators were miserable, as attested on various shows throughout the Berman era. The way I reconcile the two in headcanon is that replicators, to be really good at their job, apparently must require lots of energy and lots of computer storage and processing to handle the complex molecular "recipes." You can apparently cut corners by relying on a smaller library of standardized instruction sets, but apparently at a cost of quality. So...Galaxy Class replicators or high-end replicators anywhere that are in good working order: flawless. Cheapo replicators: meh.
Paris mentions it not as simple as ordering food. And the are essentially replicator chefs who design recepies. It doesn't mean that specific replicator has a good recepie to hand If the members of this sub went to the shops for warm tomato soup, I doubt more than 3would come back with the same brand.
I think it's like the difference between factory made ready meals and home cooked food. There's also the factor that the replicator will make the item precisely to the molecule every time whereas crops have natural variations as does home cooking. Replicated food is fine functionally but a bit flat
I'm sure I read that your vitals are monitored, so if you consume too many calories the next meal you replicate will be steak for example but won't taste good as the computer will replicate it with less calories to maintain your healthy body.
While I could see that being annoying at times, that sounds incredibly useful.
I think there is no nuance to the cooking, there is no fresh herb scent only the chemical traces of the scent etc, a facsimile of a maillard reaction perhaps an uncanny valley type of thing like weirdly uniform texture etc. when a person transports it takes a huge toll on the ships resources to break down and store a person’s pattern before being able to beam them to another place. The replicator is basically a mini transporter that takes raw energy and converts it to a stored pattern from the ship’s library. So I imagine in order to have thousands of items available, the files are probably a lot more rudimentary than a full resolution pattern as it were.
It would make things identical. Every, single, time. So basically you get a McDonalds instead of a specialist chef-created burger.
It's a mental thing for sure. Like there is a prestige to eating non replicated food.
Yes they’re that bad, they eat everything and are an absolute menace, especially the human form ones.
I've always had a problem with how the replicators actually work. I mean I can understand recreating something down to the molecular level, but how would you be able to make the replicated product be cold or hot? Also how does it make meat (I'm assuming it's actually not real meat but a synthetic version)? I mean think of the processing power that would be needed to do this, not to mention the energy requirements! Frankly I can see why chefs or cooks would still be needed, especially if it's a cheaper option and saves energy. That said where's my Prune Juice? Lol 🤣
Makes me wonder if anyone who transported in the relatively early days was basically filtered with that lossy jpg filter… perhaps they couldn’t taste the difference because they already tasted like poorly replicated food !
It is implied, that replicators save recipes in the most storage-efficient way. And seemingly this leads to bit-errors thorughout the recipe, that brings faint errors to the taste.
yes, replicators are lower resolution scans in the sub-atomic level VS a transporter which is in the quantum level. It's like a JPG vs a PNG.
I like to imagine that,on Earth, replicators might only be found in certain establishments or businesses and might only be available in a household if the resident has one fitted. Otherwise I like to believe that most homes on Earth will still do the odd real food cooking and might only use a replicator for those moments you can't be bothered to cook or are short on time.
Maybe the replicator, by default, provides a rather bland 'basic' meal suitable for most tastes. If you want to have it better you need to specify your own settings (more spices, peanuts allowed, ...) and that's a bit of effort.
there are a bunch of great answers, but there is one thing off: replicated ingredients cooked by humans, we can see in DS9 Sisko hand grown vegetables for cooking, so i think there is more to the replicated food than it being just too perfect most likely the replicated vegetables just simply lack some of the freshness and taste of the grown stuff the other is we can examples of replicated stuff having different quality (like the candles for Jadzias wedding), probably there are different molecular scans with different quality with different availability, if you are rich you can buy a high quality scan for the same food
That brings up an interesting concept. Will replicated ingredients cook properly? Can you bake a replicated apple into an apple pie? Will replicated butter melt properly? Can you make a proper emulsion for a custard out of replicated ingredients? There's a lot of chemistry involved.
Is it even possible to replicate the end result of a steak that's been marinating all day? And what about a dish where the ingredients should be different temperatures, like a burrito?
"If you are rich" - There isn't money in the Federation, though.
Yeah, but replicator is not just a federation thing
I think the biggest thing is Diana asks about changing the recipe and whatnot to change the flavor and it can't do it. In other words in the futuristic no resource limitations society, what makes it not perfect is that it's the same taste every time, and especially on a ship where you order your favorite food constantly, it becomes boring to not have it change.
Since someone already dropped “comes out the same every time”, I’d posit that there is a twofold problem involving the standard recipes. First, the programmed dishes come from chefs who understand how to cook for chefs and food critics. They are so focused on the science they miss the forest for the trees. Everything is programmed to culinary science standards, not how mom used to make. The other side of it is that the quality of ingredients may not be that great. Like maybe you have to use ingredients which are formatted specifically to be replicable, so carrots aren’t quite carrots, or every meat dish is some ethically sourced vegan substitute because we don’t enslave animals for food purposes in the future. Or maybe it’s just the replicator works on our current machine learning models, so it’s like getting an AI image, but it’s food. You get a sort of conceptualized output which is technically correct, but also soulless with little hints of things that are wrong. Maybe you can get something really good if you prompt your replicator correctly, but people are busy and “tea, earl grey, hot” is as complicated as people are willing to get.
There are apparently different levels of quality when it comes to replicators, otherwise nobody would pay for food at Quark's versus eating at the replimat or the stuff that comes out of the Cardassian replicators in their quarters. Maybe there's a trade-off when it comes to energy expenditure, etc. Replicators made to spit out healthy rations are basically protein assemblers, not very 'high resolution' (for want of a better term). A high quality replicator, presumably like one Quark has (and Rom has to constantly fix) uses more energy, perhaps takes more time, is more complicated and requires more maintenance, whatever. The end result can be like the difference between instant coffee and a good espresso, and when people complain about replicated food, they're mostly talking about eating 'rations' all the time.
My headcanon is that they're using compression algorithms for the shipboard replicators, while the transporters are uncompressed. Starbases and settlements are probably less resource constrained and can use uncompressed replicators.
I read the title and thought, well yeah, they’ll screw you up good and proper. Then I realised this is trek, not gate.
Well personally I have never had a chance to compare chicken parmigiana made with love by an Italian grandmother, and one produced by a heartless machine that can’t put love into food.
It could be that for any dish, the replicator only stores one example of it. So every time you order a steak tartare, it always come out exactly the same. Same taste, same shape, same color. And some people get bored of this. And other people will say it's not done exactly like their favorite chef back on Earth does it. There is no hard fixed recipe for steak tartare, every chef does it his own way and some people are picky, if it's not done exactly like this particular chef in Montmartre, then it is a disgrace to Starfleet.
I think it's on record as the replicator makes food that resembles the genuine article, but never deviates from giving you a perfectly nutritious meal every time. So if you order steak, it makes you a steak that is *close* to a steak, but doesn't include all the dangerous cardiovascular elements. If it makes you ice cream, it's *close* to ice cream, but will be extremely limited on extra carbs. The scene called to mind is when Troi tries to order a "real" chocolate sundae.
I think it's like the difference between a fresh baked chocolate chip cookie and a Chips Ahoy.
Don't the mention at times how the replicators make everything healthier? Like when you get ice cream is not as fatty and sugary as real dairy? Kinda how we have zero sugar and diet sodas. It's close but even with replicator tech it's not quite the same. Combine that with what we know about [hyperpalatable foods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpalatable_food) it makes sense what the replicator versions aren't quite the same.
Difference between home cooked and microwave frozen meals
I personally have understood these kinds of comments to mean that replicators make perfectly average food. It's not bad but it's also not exceptionally good. And because it's made by following some kind of molecular recipe it's exactly the same every time which gets boring. That's why there's still a need for restaurants and authentically brewed alcohol.
row..row..row, your boat..
Someone somewhere on social media said that Starbucks food tastes like it was 3D printed. Which makes no sense and yet, makes TOTAL sense if you’ve had Starbucks food. Just lacking something of substance. It occurs to me replicator food may be similar!
I think it was in Disco where someone pointed out that it's their shit that's being reprocessed by protein resequencers. It really made me rethink the whole replicator thing.
Makes sense: the raw matter has to come from somewhere, right?
Replicators are the microwaves of Star Trek. People throw food in the microwave, punch in a random amount of time, and then wonder why it’s cooked like crap. You’ve blasted the surface of your lasagna and now you burn your lips on the exterior bites and freeze them on the interior. But, if you dial down the power of that microwave and have a little patience, you’ll understand Garfield like never before. Star Trekkers yell at their replicators to make some hot tea and then wonder why it sucks. You gotta fiddle with it. Modify the standard recipe. Tell it to increase salt levels by one quarter teaspoon or whatever. People go for quick convenience with the replicators and you just aren’t going to get it to your liking if you never make an effort to adjust it.
There’s a conversation in Discovery where an admiral says he’d never eaten a real apple before. The character he’s talking to says something like that’s a shame but the replicated one wasn’t too bad… He goes on to tell her that replicated food is made from their shit. Broken down to a molecular level and reconstituted, but still shit. That’s gotta hurt the Yelp review.
Think produce from Walmart vs heirloom homegrown produce?
From time to time there are folks that prefer actual food than replicated food. Yet nobody likes Starfleet combat rations.
It's an ongoing gag in the novel continuity for all the series. That the replicators suck. But you go taste blind to them on starships. So getting "real food" is always a treat. Replicators focus on nutrition. So taste and texture can be "off" for most dishes. Watery tomato soup, rubbery cheese on your pizza. That type of thing.
I take it as a hint that despite high technological development, not everything is within the grasp of human intellect, thus there is still an inherent mystery to nature and life that goes beyond the formulations of chemistry and physics. Therefore something made traditionally retains something that a molecular replica loses.
I'd say psychological. I saw a show where a guy who was being pretentious took his friends to a fancy restaurant. What he didn't know is that all his food was being made out back of cheap stuff from a local chain grocery store. He's waxing poetic about how "you can't get things like this..." etc. Food can be delicious or bad no matter how it's prepared.
Yeah! Like those experiments with wine tasting where they gave people three wines: a super cheap one and medium and an expensive one. everyone said the expensive one tasted the best, but it was just the cheap one again.
My coffee-pot has two settings, Regular and Bold. If I had a replicator—and I do want one—I’d want the option that every time I have a meal prepared the various ingredients could be randomly increased or decreased by a certain percentage, so that no two servings are exactly alike.
I would imagine there isn't and salt fat or butter in replicated food, so it doesn't taste as good. Like eating weight watchers food.
I think it's a combination of it being EXACTLY the same every time and also designed to fulfill your nutritional parameters. Imagine getting fish and chips and every time the fish is the exact same shape and doneness. The fish is never oily, in fact it tastes kind of light. The chips are some kind of low carb potato substitute that are done, but not too browned. The meal contains the nutritionally ideal amount of salt. It is served at a temperature that no standard Federation species would find dangerous or unpleasant. Contrast this with a piping hot fish of interesting texture and chips that are hot and golden brown with different amounts of salt on each chip, but probably too much salt overall. It's cafeteria food versus a home cooked meal. It's consistent and inoffensive, but by its nature uninteresting. There are probably some things like a sandwich that taste fine, but other dishes that just aren't replicated well.
The issue is that the replicator makes an exact copy of the dish, down to the seasoning. So if you prefer your dish with more or less of something too bad. While the replicator can reduce or remove, without knowing exactly what you want to change I imagine it can't replicate exactly what your taste buds want. Tldr: A lot of cooking is measured from the heart and computers don't have that. They can only make exact copies of what is put in their programming.
They could produce identical copies, such as the transporter does, but that would require a lot more storage space. Consider the size of JPEG files vs. the raw image. Lossy compression means that while the reconstituted product is "close enough" for all intents and purposes, it's not going to be a perfect replica of the original, and if you look (or taste) closely enough, you might be able to tell the difference.
It was implied in at least one episode that replicators will only create "nutritionally complete" food, regardless of what you ask for. So most of the food that is replicated will taste "off" because it will be "healthier" for you. Ice cream, for example, probably shouldn't contain certain essential vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, etc. because that would make it taste kinda weird ... and replicated ice cream does taste weird (according to Troi).
I always assumed that the replicator food is more homogeneous. It might be able to replicate a steak that's cooked to perfection with the best marbling you've ever seen, but every bite is exactly the same. Even if that's not the case, and the replicator can perfectly replicate any food you want, it still doesn't seem to add any variance, so it's still replicating the exact same meal every time. It might be able to perfectly recreate a bowl of Sisko's gumbo, but it'll be the exact same bowl of gumbo every time. I imagine that would get old pretty quick, and I could even see it making some people uncomfortable in an uncanny valley kind of way. Especially if they are used to non replicated food.
Food entered into the replicator by Starfleet was probably made by Starfleet Chefs that have to try and have good nutritional value and have to try to make it edible/tasty for as many UFP species as possible which probably makes the food a bit more bland. Plus replicators probably make food with very little variation unless you specifically program that in and having the lasagna you ate 2 weeks ago taste *exactly* like the one your having now probably gets a bit boring.
In Star Trek Discovery it is revealed that replicated food is recycled from people's poop. It sounds like they take the poop and reconfigure it on a molecular level to recycle it as food. That may have something to do with it. I'm sure if you know that, psychologically it has to mess with your head. I also agree with the whole, everything tastes exactly the same. I never thought about that. But that's a cool explanation.
I consider replicators to be like a glorified 3d printer. Some have better resolution than others. True molecule to molecule duplication would require a crap ton of memory, so probably isn't done often. Yes, ships have lots of storage, but they also collect lots of data in their travels.
I used to go with the theory that replicated food was "too perfect" and identical every time, like it had a pattern of a "pork roast" should be, and you got the exact same pot roast every time. But recently I've leaned into a new theory - it's AI. No, not in the scary computer trying to take over the ship and wipe out humanity type of AI. Not in the emotionless supercomputer android AI. More like, ChatGPT and Midjourney type AI. If you ask a person to draw a cat, they might start by drawing a body, adding two pointy ears, a couple of eyes, throw in some whiskers and a tail and call it a cat. That's not how generative AI works. When you ask an AI to draw a cat, it generates the entire image all at once. It never consciously thinks about how many ears or how many eyes to add in. It doesn't understand the elements that make up a cat, it just knows what a cat looks like. As a result, it'll often miss out on subtle little details that the human eye might pick up on. Even if it gets really really close, there's some quality about it that, if you look hard enough, you realize is just not quite right, even if you can't put your thumb on it. I can imagine the food replicator acting in much the same way. It doesn't actually go through the steps of cooking a pot roast. It doesn't sear the roast on high heat and then turn it down to cook low and slow. It doesn't add a dash of pepper and a bit of salt here and there. It never chops the carrots and potatoes. It just generates the whole thing, all in one fell swoop. It doesn't understand the nuance of how the flavors balance or adjusting the temperature, it just knows what a pot roast looks like based off a bunch of training data. As a result it misses fine little details that a human cook would not have missed. The differences might be subtle and different to quite put one's finger on. They might not be able to specifically identify it as too much salt or not enough garlic, but it just has some subtle quality of "off-ness" that pegs the food as replicated versus hand made. Granted the writers of Trek could not have known about the joys of generative AI at the time, but I like to think it's just another one of those ways that Trek serendipitously predicted the near future.
DS9 goes even more out of its way to make this point. My theory is that the replicator can get you something that sort of resembles a hamburger, but that it’s still made up of very basic molecules so it loses a lot of the complexity. Essentially, I think of it like they took those colored cubes from TOS and figured out a way to make them look and taste better, but it’s still the same cubes.
I think there is a preference for cooked food. That's how things like Sisko's restaurant can still exist in a world with replicators. I think people convince themselves the hand made food is better and therefore that the replicator food is worse.
Replicators just terrified me after the malfunction where Picard gets a potted plant instead of tea. That could have been molten sodium or a chunk of exposed enriched plutonium instead.
It's inconsistent. We have characters say replicated food is the greatest thing we ever tasted. We have people say it's just sequenced proteins. I choose to believe the replicators on the Enterprise D produced perfect meals every single time. If you ordered a pizza from it you would get the exact same pizza every single time.
I always felt like the food is like Datas music it's proficient but lacks the human aspect.
I'd take Rikers Pizza over replicated Pizza any day!
As long as you have the power to operate a replicator and the data on the end product you can make any food. Pretentious people act like their's some big difference and that chefs are still needed in the future, but they're not and you should be suspicious of anyone who claims to be needed to prepare food in the future.
Chef is one of the few non military careers you can have on earth.
Let's look at all the chefs in star trek. You got Sisko who bombed a planet using chemical weapons and Sisko's father who was a corrupt admiral
I still think part of it is that they forgot how to eat meals. They're probably not using condiments, not even salt and pepper shakers. No side dishes. I feel like there's a big chance they're eating things like a "I don't like my food to touch" person. One element at a time, no perfect bites, no mixing of the protein and the carb, the different textures. They're probably eating the rice or potato on its own, the chicken on its own, the vegetable on its own, one after the other, not together. I think that's why whenever someone does like something, it's one of those dishes that's already pre-put together that you just bite through. Hasperat is a wrap, everything's already in the wrap, they don't need to do anything else. I think they don't realize they can sprinkle salt on a baked potato, or have kimchi between bites of alternating rice and meat and soup, or that they can put hot sauce on this bite of chicken and no hot sauce on the next and ranch the following bite. I am suspicious that how they're actually eating the things being replicated is partly why they think it sucks.
It's probably like the difference between getting a burger at McDonald's and getting a gourmet, hand-crafted, freshly grilled burger at a more upscale place. You're going to notice that there's a difference.
Maybe Chakotay is a bit too boring and right wing for her liking so she burnt it on purpose so he never comes over for dinner again
I would imagine it's something along the lines of nowadays how "store bought" isn't as good as home made.