Watson, the super computer by IBM that beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy has now taken a leap of faith. It’s landed right in our kitchen. You might think it’s just inputting a set of ingredients and recipes and out comes a beautiful birthday cake. But no, it’s so much more than that! Watson’s aim is to make tasty yet healthy food – the dream.
Lav Varshney, research staff member at the Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, tells us,
We’re basically trying to create a system that can automatically create culinary recipes that are both flavorful and healthy by pushing computing into the area of creativity, which is a new frontier of cognitive computing. This is very exciting because creativity is an ability humans have but computers are thought not to have, so we’d like to push in that direction.
The supercomputer shared it’s first public recipe for Indian Turmeric Paella, back in 2012. So it’s not a surprise that Watson is now cooking up a storm 😉
But it didn’t stop there. IBM opened up a food truck at SXSW that sold Bengali Butternut BBQ sauce. FastCoDesign describes it as,
a golden, algorithmic elixir born from the silicon mind of Watson himself
The back label of this bottle of sauce are just as tasty as its contents. A typical BBQ sauce would contain ingredients like vinegar, tomatoes or water. But Watson’s version reads, ” Ingredient one: White wine. Ingredient two: Butternut squash.” The sauce was made with one goal in mind (a virtual mind that all computers have at least) which was to make food super tasty but super healthy at the same time. So as you read more, you find a lot of ingredients you wouldn’t quite associate with a BBQ sauce, such as rice vinegar, dates, cilantro, tamarind , cardamom and turmeric. Along with BBQ mainstays, molasses, garlic and mustard.
The nutritional content is top of the class too! Not only is the sauce sweet and tangy, it’s low on sugar. It contains only 2g per serving versus the more common 16g per serving for common BBQ sauces. Thus clearly living up to the aim of tasty but healthy food!
As Napolean once said, “An army marches on its stomach. He who controls our stomachs controls it all.”