The chef from Diverxo made a plea for creative freedom in haute cuisine after listening to culinary possibilities of an Artificial Intelligence tool that predicts gastronomic trends in the global market in real time.
Artificial Intelligence at the service of cooking is starting to become a reality and Reale Seguros Madrid Fusión 2020 is not indifferent to this. On this occasion, it’s been all about the presentation of the gastronomic uses of an IBM and Siro Foods tool based on a database. “It’s the result of compiling the opinions expressed on the Internet about a product or a technique in order to interpret future trends”, its creators explained.
“A tool with huge potential but that we must combine with our peculiarities, with what we are, with the territory that we defend”, Fernando Sáenz (DellaSera, Logroño) said, the man known as the best ice-cream maker in Spain who was also on stage. “An interesting application if used to make the big (food) industry business more sustainable, and more healthy, but it’s an application that those of us who form part of this bastion as creators cannot use”, Dabiz Muñoz (DiverXo, Madrid) concluded.
The chef from Madrid, in view of the potential of a tool that may mark the future tastes of diners, came out in defence of the collective. “Those of us in haute cuisine and creative cooking shouldn’t use it. We are one of the last free strongholds, based on human talent and personal talent. We cannot dehumanize cooking like this”, he explained before the audience that packed the auditorium in Ifema pavilion 14 burst into applause. “At my restaurant –the chef from Diverxo added-, I even explain new tastes and new perceptions to my customers, so we cannot really go in for major trends”.
“The best restaurants and the best ice cream parlours, are the ones that don’t follow trends, and are the ones that are linked to talent”, Muñoz concluded. He could have been Sáenz. The Riojan, however, qualified this: “We can use these trends, to know what people like, in order to combine it with what we are”.
The creators of the tool looked on and understood. Juan Carlos Martínez and Carolina Martín, from the R+D department at Siro Foods, had explained the benefits of a tool –created together with IBM- “that places customers’ future trends at the service of chefs, trends that emerge from the freely expressed opinions that customers have written and spread in blogs and social networks, without the pressure exerted by opinion surveys”, they explained. “The tool is an international gossip item of the feelings expressed by diners”, the president of Madrid Fusión, José Carlos Capel, who was also on stage, pointed out.
Future trends according to the Siro Foods tool
For the moment, in a preliminary study, Martín and Martínez revealed that, “we can point out some of the tastes of the public as far as food and gastronomy are concerned”. “In Europe we are and will be concerned about sustainability, so that kombu or spirulina are popular. So are hemp, kombucha and tempe, as well as the use of crickets that, although it’s difficult because of the cultural clash, the public values because they are sustainable. We predict that they will set a trend”.
On the other hand, as a curiosity, they explained that in Europa snake meat, kimchi or sugar aren’t setting trends, “it’s being replaced more and more”.
In other parts of the world, in Oceania, for example, according to the study by Siro Foods fusion cuisine and Asian ingredients are popular; they like sriracha and they love fermented products, but not cumin, which is not trendy. In Asia, as a final example, American ingredients like pink guava or taro root, Sichuan peppers, and in general, sweet textures are trendy; among other things, honey and mustard, are not.