Can AI make a difference to culinary creations?

India Today

03-07-2025

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today Spice issue dated June 2025)Once upon a stovetop, a chef learned to cook by kneeling at the altar of French technique. Sauces whispered secrets in mother tongues—bchamel, velout, hollandaise—each a step in the sacred choreography of cuisine. To be a 'real' chef meant to master the classics: the stiff whites of culinary school, the ballet of knife skills, the reverence for Escoffier. That was the gospel. That was the gold standard. That was cuisine.advertisementAnd then there was everything else.The food of the Global South—fiery, fermented, fragrant—was boxed up and labeled 'ethnic.' A word that didn't just define origin, but diminished it. These were not cuisines, they were curiosities. Not disciplines, but deviations. Dosa was never a doctrine. Mole was a mystery. Kimchi, curry, injera, pho—delicious, but never 'refined.' These foods, these mother cuisines, motherships of flavor and tradition, were seen as spice-laden sideshows to the main act. Northern Europe had 'gastronomy.' The rest had 'ethnic food.'
That schism—soaked in colonial echoes—became culinary canon. But the kitchen is a living thing. And now, the walls are cracking.Enter AI. The algorithm doesn't play favorites—not unless we train it to. It doesn't arrive with bias or baggage. It doesn't know which cuisine sat at the head of the colonial table, which was served last, or which was never invited at all. On its own, AI might be cleaner than many mortal minds—minds weighed down by racism, sexism, ageism, xenophobia, and all the ghettoizing, gendered, gatekeeping ways we've ranked and reduced each other. But AI can also become as bigoted, as small-minded, as spiteful as the people who feed it. If we pour in prejudice, it will remix that too. That's the danger. Yet if we leave it open to learn from everywhere—freely, imaginatively—it just might become better than us at seeing food for what it really is: shared, shifting, sacred.advertisementIn this way, AI is a bridge—a blender of boundaries, a batter of traditions. It brings cuisines to curious cooks and opens palates that once paused at the unknown. It's beautiful. It's bold. It's progress.But—let's not kid ourselves—it's not the whole plate.Because food isn't just code. It's context. Recipes are not spreadsheets. They are stories. They carry the weight of history, the hush of grandmothers, the hands of labour, the breath of the land. You cannot truly taste Thai green curry without understanding the wet heat of Bangkok, the snap of morning markets, the silence before a monsoon. You cannot recreate rasam unless you've felt its comfort on a sick day, its sharpness on a hot afternoon, its pulse inside a Tamil kitchen.AI can suggest. It can simulate. It can serve up patterns. But it cannot replicate presence. It cannot simulate soul. Here lies the peril—not in the machine, which is magnificent—but in our minds, if they go lazy. If we stop hungering. If we let curiosity calcify. The danger is not that technology will take over. The danger is that we'll let it—gladly, passively, eyes closed, hands idle, taste buds untrained. We will lose to technology only if we lose our will to learn.advertisementTo cook is to commit. To commit is to care. The best chefs are not just technicians—they are travelers, tinkerers, thinkers. They sweat and stir, taste and tweak, question everything and absorb anything. They know that to understand a cuisine, you must immerse. You must walk the farms, drink the water, touch the spice, talk to the aunties, hear the hymns. You must know what grows when, what's cooked why, and how joy finds its way to the table in twenty thousand ways.So yes, bring on the bots. Use them. Train them. Let them spark ideas. But let us not forget that culinary alchemy still needs fire—real fire. The fire of feeling, of fatigue, of failure, of fierce devotion.Let's raise AI in the kitchen, not as a savior, but as a sous-chef. Let it help us remember what we might've missed, what the world once ignored. Let it be a map, not the meal. A guide, not the guru. A prompt, not the poetry.Because cuisine is not just what you cook. It's how you live. It's memory, migration, meaning. And no machine, no matter how smart, can taste that for us.advertisement—Suvir Saran is a Michelin awarded chef, author and columnist.Subscribe to India Today Magazine- Ends