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Comment by waltbosz | Hacker News Reader

I've spend some time imaging about the day when general purpose cooking robots are inexpensive enough to be as ubiquitous as indoor plumbing.

How would it affect peoples' diets? Would we eat more healthily because our robot can easily cook delicious and nutritious meals? Or would we have our robots make us delicious unhealthy meals?

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There are some genuinely delicious foods that are healthier than junk food and most people would agree tastes better, but they don’t want to cook or don’t want to learn. A robot that excels at cooking can serve you a delicious, healthy meal from a different cuisine every day. Theoretically you can go for years without having the same meal twice. The robot can also take your target macros and nutrition into consideration when deciding on what to cook and how much of it.

I suspect it'd help people vary up their diets more at least, since they can ask for something new rather than rehashing the same 5-10 meal types over and over again. Would that make for healthier food? Maybe, because at least part of why at least some people eat unhealthily is because it's easy to cook the same few things over and over again.

One problem is that experts can’t even agree on what a “healthy” diet is. See Vegan vs. Low-Carb/Carnivore. For every documentary “proving” that one is better than the other, there is another one “proving” the opposite. There are doctors, professors of nutrition, corruption, paid for research results, and people who have dramatically improved their health on both sides of the battle line. Nutritional science nowadays reminds me more of politics or religion than science. With people screaming at each other from different camps.

It depends on how good the robot is at it. Anyone can make a meal taste better fast by just dumping extra butter into everything.

I think the operative word here is delicious.

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