Humans make Art

Robots make reflections

digital illustration by the Author

(previously published, elsewhere, revised one line 4/18/23

Listen, I spent the majority of my adult life, just shy of three decades, working in restaurants or professional kitchens of one kind or another and I am here to tell you the darkest secret of that entire family of human enterprises, which is no small statement since the restaurant family is one that has more than a few skeletons in its walk-in freezer.

The deep shame at the heart of the American professional kitchen, no matter how much they charge for a caesar salad with chicken, is that most of the people cooking the food have no idea whatsoever how to cook.

None.

Nor do those pirates and outcasts have any real desire to improve their culinary skills, they are just there because no one else would hire them, the restaurant world sweeps up a large quantity of humans who just can’t make it work in the “real” world, the ones with facial tattoos and errant piercings, extreme ADHD, Tourettes. The ones who belong to marginalized groups who find it frustratingly hard to find employment elsewhere because of bigotry and bias. Artists and dreamers who forgot to pay attention to the “stuff that mattered” in school. Ex-cons who have managed to keep on the good side of their P.O.

Drug addicts and alcoholics… you have all heard the stories by now.

Am I painting an uglier picture then the sanitized and denim-apron-washed kitchens of the celebrity chefs who have dominated the narrative for the last two decades? Sure, they can stock their pristine gustatory laboratories with eager young cheflettes fresh out of preposterously overpriced (so they must be good, right?) “Culinary Arts Programs” and train them to churn out endless iterations of the same “concept” that Michelin starred chefs have been ruminating on and regurgitating for almost a century now.

We all know good food when we see it now, right?

The propaganda has been a success.

But even those eager young proteges lined up at the rows of tables that have replaced the traditional line and pass, no matter how highly trained and undoubtably skilled, can’t really cook, most of them anyway.

I know this to be true because I have worked in the sort of restaurant that serves 30 dollar desserts on plates that cost more than the dishwasher, who carefully hand washed them, made in a week. I have seen with my own eyes how those sorts of places operate, heard the horror stories that proved that the horrors I myself witnessed were the rule rather than the exception.

If you are the sort of person who eats in restaurants where the chef’s name is printed somewhere on the menu than I am sure you have stories about those nights, where even your favorite place just couldn’t get it right, the food was off and the servers seemed more shell-shocked and distracted than usual, maybe you got so mad the manager had to come to the table and apologize, buy you a round of drinks or dessert, or in the absolute worst cases just comp the whole tab and hope you didn’t bash them on your socials, these sorts of things happen constantly in restaurants and it is because there just aren’t enough competent cooks behind the scenes to realize the gastro-pub pipe-dreams of the chef-proprietors who’s concept failed to live up to the investor pitch.

Turns out even two years in a “Culinary Institute” can’t really turn a hack into a cook, or a cook into a chef. Turns out that offering human beings garbage pay, shit hours and zero future is not really a great way to attract eager talent either, go figure.

The restaurant industry has been dying for years, and I don’t think this is just me looking at things through slime-mold colored lenses, although I will admit that my 29ish years in the business might have soured me on restaurants a bit, maybe the reader has noted the slightly bitter flavor of these words of mine.

The restaurant industry (as we know it) is dying, three years ago I would have predicted a couple decades of decline and decrepitude before it ultimately metamorphosed into its future form (more on that in a minute) but the onset of Covid-19 and the paradigm wrecking havoc that ensued has accelerated the dissolution for a variety of reasons. I think the future of restaurants is upon us, the ones that are hanging on are doing so by a thread, usually a thread made of investor’s good will, a notoriously finicky material, to be sure, and one that will always fail eventually if pushed hard enough.

No I am not saying that premade food sources will evaporate and everyone will have to learn to cook for themselves. I have just spent the last several paragraphs arguing that most people are fairly lousy at producing decent food, even the ones who do so in return for a paycheck. When I say the restaurant industry is dying I mean the one that we are all familiar with, that obsolete monstrosity built of equal parts tradition, foolishness, love of great food, blood, sweat and mafia money, that is what is dying and I, for one, am glad to see it go. In the very near future I predict that if you want to eat food prepared by human beings you will have to go looking for it, at no small cost. Most of the restaurants in your town, whether they are “mom ’n' pop’s” or iterations of another national mega chain, will be staffed by robots - front and back of the house, or dining room and kitchen as you normies call it.

Its ok. People can’t cook, remember? Once the robots get a just a little bit better your dining experience will get a whole lot better, I can promise you. Not only that but automated kitchens will produce that better quality, more consistent food with less waste and greater energy efficiency, all without abusing or taking advantage of a single disadvantaged or under-privileged human being.

It is true that all of those human beings, who can’t seem to find work anywhere else, will be out of a crappy job - but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?

Tasteless culinary jokes aside I don’t really mean to sound so mean, this is just how human progress works: invention leads to new industry which leads to obsolescence for whatever old cracked and dusty thing the glittering new bauble so cleverly outshines. Individuals, sometimes even nation-sized groups, often lose out (to put it very gently) even as the wheel of progress carries the rest of society toward a “better tomorrow”, this can’t be helped. Facing facts is not pessimism it is pragmatism, denial should not be mistaken for positivity.

The robots are coming for the restaurant people’s jobs and it will be a net win for most of humanity. Don’t hate me for speaking my truth.

But wait, you say, even if you are forced to accept the validity of my predictions despite their callous disregard for my former troglodytic co-inhabitants, fellow prisoners, coworkers… whatever… even if the robots are coming for their jobs and most of the restaurants are automated within the next five years there will still be some places where humans congregate to eat food prepared by the rare individual talent, and their hand-picked and well treated crew of equally rare culinarians who will surprise and surpass expectations with ever more and always greater epicurean innovation…

To which I say: probably, but significant travel will almost definitely be involved and it will be a very, very expensive night out.

There will always be a place for the bespoke and handmade in every industry that is automated, there will always be people who make beautiful things by hand and there will always be people who are willing to spend quite a bit to own those things, restaurants will be no exception, but the ones that do manage to operate with all human staff will be exceptional, in every sense of the word.

Ironically the recipe for the death of the restaurant industry, at least from the perspective of the average human employee therein, at the servo-actuated environmental interface appendage of the line-cook-o-tron 9000(tm), was cooked up generations ago and it was a formula developed to allow restaurants to remain in business despite the fact that most of the humans involved couldn’t cook. Restaurants have been practicing a kind of human-actuated automation for as long as people have been adding the word “fast” (as in quick, not to be confused with the kind that means self inflicted hangry) to the list of qualities considered desirable in their daily repast. Oddly two of the most fully automated types of modern restaurant operate on the diametric edges of the industry, on the one side the fast food industry and on the other the modern three star palace of three star haute cuisine with its army of identically dressed quasi-servants. Many of the “employees” in the finest restaurants get paid less than a servant’s pittance btw, working, as they do “for the resume” - willing to “stage” or do unpaid internships in return for the chance that a little bit of a famous chef’s glitter will rub off on them during their indenture.

Both fast food and slow rely on a “factory” approach to preparation. One person minds the burger defroster while another keeps an eye on the gauges of the mayonnaise extruder lest the pressure get out of hand, and, on the other end of the kitchen continuum, the average fast-food employee is tasked with even more specific and repetitive tasks.

As long as you can gather enough people together in one room and teach them each to do their one task the way you want it done you can reproduce the perfect truffled white asparagus and tripe tart or triple/quarter/half bacon five pounder with cheese-adjacent-coating as many times as you can find people willing to shell out for such, assuming you can train the pickle guy to consistently drop between 1 and 4 neon green disks in a careless pile somewhere in a bun sized area every time a bun is presented for pickling.

Also assuming your pickle guy lasts more than a week or two after their training is complete before disappearing into the mysterious fog that swallows 1 out of 5 new restaurant employees shortly after their second post-dated paycheck finally gets cashed by the bank.

The robots are going to make that system that is already in place actually work. The owners and operators are ecstatic, they have been trying to force human beings to behave like robots for centuries. The onset of literal robots is the answer to the capitalist’s darkest dreams and the path to the deserved profits that an unreliable and unruly workforce have, for so long, deprived them.

What is fascinating to me (and also frustrating and a little scary because it sort of feels like I am being chased by a dystopian future if such a thing is even possible) is that I see something very similar playing out in the worlds of visual art, photography included, and of the written word. Both of which worlds I am exploring in the hopes of maybe finding a new, non culinary, profession for the next handful of decades, or however long my personal thread holds out in the weave.

Even as I practice the arts and glamours of the glamorous arts I hope to practice I read, and hear, almost daily, of new advances in “artificial intelligence” and machine learning systems that are remarkably good at producing engaging imagery and somewhat less good (but daily getting better) at producing readable text. It is quite likely that chatGPT or one of its competitors will soon be able to produce prose that is even enjoyable to read… Will it be poetry? Literature? Worthy of the same respect accorded to humanity’s great authors? I am sure we will be debating that question for years to come.

I am not here to pick yet another fight about whether AI can make Art, I don’t think that is really the important question anyway.

I think the robots will definitely put a lot of a certain sort of artists and writers out of business though, it is hard to envision a place in the future for the human photographers of moodily lit toothpaste tubes (we miss you Mr. Adams) or for copywriters in general (sorry), or the writers of instruction manuals (not clear humans are actually currently writing these last anyway, a mystery best left for another day) and it is safe to say that image and text generators will produce a very large quantity of the “general media" near-future humanity consumes on their personal media consumption devices, whatever those may look like further along the continuum.

Will there still be a place for humans who want to produce clever drawings, inspiring paintings and ethereal photography? Yes of course there will. There will also be a place for humans who want to write creative and interesting poetry, prose, fiction and non-fiction and whatever else they can think of.

It will be a small place, off the beaten path, a place where only the most discerning of customers will go, like holy pilgrims, finally arriving after an arduous journey to be presented with bespoke delicacies. True treasures of the heart, produced with love and honed by craft, imbued with the divine breath of inspiration that is the exclusive province of beings with spirit within.

No robots will work there.

It will probably be quite expensive.

I, for one, have already reserved a table.

Maybe I will see you there?