Google’s Food Mood Will Prepare a Recipe for You Using Artificial Intelligence
Google Arts & Culture is the search giant’s hub for high-resolution scans of art and culture from museums and archives around the world. Like the rest of the company, the noble platform is not above experimenting with artificial intelligence and has launched a new tool that aims to create a fusion recipe that mixes two different types of cuisines.
Why you’d want an AI to generate an untested combination of, say, Mexican and Chinese dishes instead of looking up a recipe from a real human chef who can taste food is anyone’s guess, but for the curious there’s a tool called Food Mood . here to show you what the bot thinks you should make for dinner.
Food Mood combines recipes from two different cuisines.
Food Mood is Google’s experiment with artificial intelligence, created by artists from the Google Arts & Culture Lab. It’s billed as a playful fusion recipe generator that can combine elements of two different cuisines to create a new dish. (Yes, I double-checked, and this is not the company’s annual April Fool’s joke.)
What real chefs learn through years of training, inspiration, sweat, and abuse in the kitchen, Food Mood does with the help of generative artificial intelligence. The experiment, created by artists Emmanuel Durgony and Gael Hugo, uses Google Gemini 1.0 Pro via Vertex AI.
The online tool is easy to use and quite intuitive. Tell the AI what type of dish you’re looking for (appetizer, main, or soup), how many people you want to serve, and what dishes you want to mix (from two columns of suggested options—the list of countries is quite extensive).
Click the “Cook” button to generate a recipe (although you can also create random recipes).
I tested this by choosing a starter for two people, mixing influences from South Korea and India. (Based on my tests, the resulting recipes are not too complicated and you can make them at home.)
Food Mood gives you several options to personalize your recipe. Click the slider icon on the home page to display modifiers and tell the AI, for example, whether you prefer vegan, vegetarian or gluten-free food. You can also add your own ingredient list—there’s an auto-suggest menu that lets you choose up to three.
Whether or not the end result is a recipe for something you actually want to eat, the recipe page is a wonderful showcase of Google’s evolving AI capabilities. It creates a neat layout with a fancy name, step-by-step instructions, cooking times and pro tips on one side. There’s even an AI-generated photo of what the dish will (?) look like.
Please note the disclaimer included with each recipe:
This experiment uses artificial intelligence to inspire you to get creative in the kitchen. The recipes were not developed in kitchens or by chefs. Please use common sense and always prioritize food safety.
AI cookbooks are here
Everyone has used the Internet to find recipes, and sites like AllRecipes and FoodCombo have already given you the ability to search for recipes that combine ingredients you have on hand. Food Mood simply takes it one step further by inventing a recipe for you if one doesn’t exist (and with the caveat that it might not actually taste very good). This isn’t really a problem for trained chefs, and at least you’ll go into the process knowing that you’re asking the AI to cook for you. This is preferable to buying a cookbook that you didn’t even know was created by artificial intelligence .