alt Hacker NewsThat is completely wrong.
Food preparation, like pharmaceutical drug fabrication, is inherently scientific and methodologically controllable.
Look no further than the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective. Original synthesis line construction is hard. But the exact formula "add this", "turn on stir bar", "do you see particulate? Yes for +10m at stir", etc.
And if their results are replicated, theyre seeing 99.9% yields, compared to commercial practices of 99% (Solvaldi)
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I am completely unsurprised that a person with a PhD in mathmatics and physics who spent 8 years working on clandestine lab medicine was able to produce high quality end products.
I also think it's a wholly dishonest rebuttal of my point.
If you honestly think chemistry (or any of the classic sciences/engineering) is as easy as copy+pasting a recipe and procedure, I suggest putting down the keyboard and trying to build something on mother nature OS. It will be a truly humbling experience.
Spoken like someone who has never had to actually do these things in real life.
Recipes and formulae do not encode all the minutiae and expertise required to reproduce them. You can tell someone to sear a steak at whatever temperature for however long, but you can't encode the skill and experience required to reproduce in arbitrary conditions. One must learn what a correctly seared steak looks, feels, and tastes like and how to achieve that on uncalibrated cooking equipment.
Your assertion only holds true in a vacuum. If 100% of inputs, materials, environmental conditions are completely standardized and under control then sure, you can follow step by step instructions. The real world does not work that way. No stove on the market is calibrated. Reagents come with impurities. Your skillet may not conduct heat as well as expected or your mains electricity might be low causing your mantle to heat slower and your stir rod to stir slower.
These are things that one has to learn and experience in order to compensate for.