You Call This Thai Food? The Robotic Taster Will Be the Judge
International New York Times | 28 September 2014
BANGKOK
— Hopscotching the globe as Thailand’s prime minister, Yingluck
Shinawatra repeatedly encountered a distressing problem: bad Thai food.
Too
often, she found, the meals she sampled at Thai restaurants abroad were
unworthy of the name, too bland to be called genuine Thai cooking. The
problem bothered her enough to raise it at a cabinet meeting.
Her
political party has since been thrown out of office, in a May military
coup, but her initiative in culinary diplomacy lives on.
At
a gala dinner at a ritzy Bangkok hotel on Tuesday the government will
unveil its project to standardize the art of Thai food — with a robot.
Diplomats and dignitaries have been invited to witness the debut of a machine that its promoters say can scientifically evaluate Thai cuisine, telling the difference, for instance, between a properly prepared green curry with just the right mix of Thai basil, curry paste and fresh coconut cream, and a lame imitation.
A
boxy contraption filled with sensors and microchips, the so-called
e-delicious machine scans food samples to produce a chemical signature,
which it measures against a standard deemed to be the authentic version.
The
government-financed Thai Delicious Committee, which oversaw the
development of the machine, describes it as “an intelligent robot that
measures smell and taste in food ingredients through sensor technology
in order to measure taste like a food critic.”
In
a country of 67 million people, there are somewhere near the same
number of strongly held opinions about Thai cooking. A heated debate
here on the merits of a particular nam prik kapi, a spicy chili dip of
fermented shrimp paste, lime juice and palm sugar, could easily go on
for an hour without coming close to resolution.
But there does seem to be some agreement on one point at least: Bad Thai food is a more acute problem overseas.
Thais,
who can establish an immediate bond discussing where they will get
their next meal or the merits of particular food stalls, complain that
Thai restaurants overseas cater to non-Thai palates by pulling punches
on spice and not respecting the delicate balance between sweet, sour,
salty and four-alarm spicy.
Ingredients
like fresh tamarind, Thai limes and galangal, an aromatic root similar
to ginger, are not readily available overseas, and the substitution of
inferior ingredients frequently yields a dish that a Bangkok gourmand
might describe in the Thai vernacular as “food even a dog would not
swallow.”
Add
to that a soupçon of culinary chauvinism, which holds that authentic
Thai food can be prepared only by Thais, usually, Thai cooks say, those
who absorbed their cooking acumen tugging on the apron strings of their
grandmothers.
“There
are many Thai restaurants all around the world that are not owned by
Thai people,” said Supachai Lorlowhakarn, an adviser to the National
Innovation Agency, which is in charge of the Thai Delicious program. He
added, almost apologetically, “They are owned by Vietnam or Myanmar, or
maybe even Italian or French.”
The
agency has spent around one-third of its budgeted 30 million baht,
around $1 million, on Thai Delicious, including around $100,000 to
develop the e-delicious machine, according to Sura-at Supachatturat, a
manager at the agency. The Thai Delicious Committee, which includes
government officials, scholars, a chef and a food critic, also receives
financing from private companies that are partners in the project.
One
element of the program is a direct result of Ms. Yingluck’s travels. On
a visit to New York she noticed the sanitation inspection system in
which letter grades are pasted on restaurant windows, according to a
former aide, and wondered whether Thailand could develop a similar
system to shame Thai restaurants into making tastier food.
So Thai Delicious offers a logo that restaurants can affix to their menus as long as chefs use officially sanctioned recipes.
Thai
Delicious has also produced a free app that includes recipes approved
by a government committee. So far, the committee has approved about 10
recipes, three of which have been published on the Thai Delicious app.
But
the tasting machine is the real novelty. Nakah Thawichawatt, a
businessman who is trying to commercialize it, hopes to sell models for
$18,000 apiece to Thai Embassies in countries with many Thai
restaurants.
The
machine evaluates food by measuring its conductivity at different
voltages. Readings from 10 sensors are combined to produce the chemical
signature.
“We
wanted the cheapest and easiest approach to measure food,” said Sirapat
Pratontep, a British-trained expert in nanotechnology who led the
development of the machine. “You just put in the food and you get a
rating.”
Because
even computers cannot judge taste, the food is compared with a standard
derived from a database of popular preferences for each dish. For tom
yam, the spicy soup infused with Kaffir lime leaves and coriander, for
instance, researchers posted notices at the prestigious Chulalongkorn
University in Bangkok, requesting 120 tasters. The tasters — students,
university staff and area workers — were paid a few dollars each for
their trouble. They were served 10 differently prepared soups and rated
each one.
The
winning soup was declared the standard, and its chemical coordinates
were programmed into the machine. As a greater number of tasters’
opinions are programmed into the machine, it will be able to judge
whether a dish is too salty or spicy or has other flavor defects, Mr.
Sirapat said.
A
reporter who visited the laboratory where the machine is being
developed brought green curry prepared in the kitchens of the Foreign
Correspondents’ Club of Thailand. A sample was placed in the
stainless-steel tray, the machine made a whirring sound, and moments
later it issued a score of 78 out of 100.
“Normally
we say that anything lower than 80 is not up to standard,” Mr. Nakah
said. He hypothesized that the club might be catering to foreign tastes.
“Maybe because foreigners eat there they prepare it differently,” he
said.
Traditionally,
the main laboratory of Thai cuisine is the street. Legions of roadside
chefs — many of whom have fanatic followings but have never used a
measuring cup, let alone followed a written recipe — work in kitchens
that often consist only of a large wok embedded in a hand-pushed cart.
At
a tiny food stall along one of Bangkok’s traffic-clogged boulevards,
the owner, Thaweekiat Nimmalairatana, 35, questioned the very notion of
standard recipes.
He
has been cooking since he was 10 years old and said the slightest
variation during the preparation of his dishes — changing the order that
ingredients are mixed or the brand of fish sauce — affects the taste.
“I
use my tongue to test if it’s delicious or not,” he said. “I think the
government should consider using a human to gauge authenticity.”
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