Hey yall! I’m stoned af and watching star trek on a weekend, naturally. I lost my place since last weekend in TNG season 3, but I knew that I wasn’t far in so I just watched all the intros until I found where I left off. Episode 8 “the price”, Troi gets frustrated with the replicator for wanting a “real” chocolate sundae. This raised a question for me, wouldn’t food replicators be intelligent enough to simulate the process of “the standard” ingredients being processed into the recipe? Like I thought that was the point of being able to say “Earl grey tea, hot”. Like wouldn’t she just have to say “betazoid chocolate sundae” or whatever?
EDIT: SECOND QUESTION: Say you have a family recipe cookbook or whatever and the comfort food is in that cookbook, couldn’t you just say “simulate the process of making the recipe from this cookbook”?
I would imagine that the replicators do make the exact same thing every time. The same texture, ripeness, distribution of toppings, etc. each and every time. So wanting the ‘real’ thing may be part placebo, and part wanting to experience the random imperfections of a natural product.
Could someone with enough time and effort make the replicator able to create slight variations on the food that wouldn’t unintentionally poison people? Sure. However it seems like the replicator is used as a future MRE and that natural food is genuinely preferred by most people in that universe.
This has always been my head cannon as well. Even if there is some randomness to it, it will still be so much the same every time that eventually you will get bored with it. Compare that to the wild variation you would get with real ingredients and a messy human throwing various things in with the wrong amounts maybe leaving things out or adding in something else that normally wouldn’t be there, a wildly different take on the dish.