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How can culinary traditions be preserved, Spratt asked, when food is ultimately meant to be consumed? UNESCO recognizes French cuisine as an intangible heritage, which it defines as not the cultural manifestation itself, but rather the wealth of knowledge and skills that is transmitted through it from one generation to the next.

The gastronomic algorithms project, in contrast, emphasizes the cultural manifestation itself. Specifically, the project focuses on the artistic dimension of plating through Passards use of collages to visually conceive of actual plates of food. Taking this one step further, the project also explores how fruit-and-vegetable-embellished paintings by the Italian Renaissance artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593) could be reproduced through the use of artificial intelligence tools.

Spratt then asked the leading question of her research: How could GANs, a generative form of AI, emulate the culinary images, and would doing so visually reveal anything about the creative process between the chefs abstracted notions of the plates and collages, and their actual visual execution as dishes?

Experimenting With Datasets

Although Passards collages are a source of inspiration for his platings, a one-to-one visual correlation between the appearance of both does not exist. The dataset initially comprised photos posted by Passard on Instagram, images provided by the restaurants employees, and photos captured by Spratt at L'Arpge during each of the different seasons. This was later supplemented by images of vegetables and fruits on plates, as well as sliced variations procured from the internet using web scraping tools.

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Artificial Intelligence and the Art of Culinary Presentation - Columbia University