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This resource is great, but only focuses on US and European ingredients/techniques -- probably because oral traditions were much more common back in the day in
by airkumar 6y ago
This resource is great, but only focuses on US and European ingredients/techniques -- probably because oral traditions were much more common back in the day in Asia/Africa.
The fact that these western recipes/techniques are more well-documented than eastern techniques is one factor in why western cuisine has historically received a lot more attention in restaurants/cooking schools as well as popular media (we'll set aside colonial biases, etc for now.)
As we use structured data to draw inferences and then guide actions more and more (ML -> AI...) the fact that databases like this skew entirely western will lead to distorted suggestions in applications that, say, aim to generate cooking curricula programmatically to teach cooking (I'm sure y'all can think of better examples than that.)
I wonder if voice technology can help capture oral histories, oral traditions, and allow those to be structured in a way that only written traditions have been in the recent past. There is hope! We'll all be better for it, too, when we can access the histories and traditions (many of which have been lost, or almost lost, at this point) of the whole world, not just a small section of it.
- Finnucane 6y agoThe bulk of the Schlesinger collection was donated by Julia Child from her personal library, and yes, English-language cookbooks covering Asian and and especially African cuisine were scarce before 1940. And Child was definitely a Francophile when it came to food, so her collection was skewed that way.