Hackpacts

Essay on the recipe

Eating is always much more than eating. Rinse, peel, chop, slice. Fry, sear, roast, grill. The pieces of the algorithm are interchangeable, but only by respecting the order of the operations, repeating the steps, you will get to the same result. In every single operation hides a world of knowledge. Where we are now, it all depends on trial and error.

So what makes code, algorithms, programming so similar to instructions, recipes, cooking? Or is it a stretch to compare the two?

Many (programmers) have attempted to explain programming to 'the people' by imagining a computer program to function 'just like a recipe'. The assumption here is that cooking is easy, everybody likes to cook, everybody can understang cooking. What shapes can that take? In this example (http://www.cs4fn.org/programming/recipeprogramming.php), the author is quick to note that 'Programmers are the master chefs of the computing world - except the recipes they invent don't just give us a nice meal, they change the way we live.' His claim seems to be: the two are similar, but, of course, cooking is infinitely more trivial than programming, because the latter has lifechanging capacities.

Others have tried to provide simplified explanations for different concepts, through the medium of a recipe. In Algorithmic Kitchen, the author tries to explain big data by using a standard format for a recipe.

Plan for a NLP expercise with recipes

Mind map

Exercise idea

Write down a full day's menu from the past week. Wrote down an imaginary full day's menu from when you were back home (if from here, when you were living with parents). What has changed and what has remained the same? Why? What are the current influences over your daily menu? What would you like to change?

Workshop idea

Take one dish that is easy and convenient to make (e.g. Guacamole). The ingredients you conveniantly have on the table, which can be purchased at any shop around the city, have travelled a long way to come to you. Can we retrace the routes of this dish? Where does each ingredient come from?

Steps:

Locate the provenience of each ingredient on the map, as accurately as possible (location of plantation, factory, etc)
Research/imagine the possible route - by ship, train, etc up until the Netherlands/Rotterdam/Albert Heijn/this workshop
Trace the route and export it, then turn it into a pdf
Write down the recipe including these steps
Make guac, enjoy

User:Alice/Experiments

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