All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

Overall Reception of the Paper & Title

• Many find the technical idea interesting but strongly criticize the title “All of human cooking compressed into 2 MB” as misleading and clickbait.
• Commenters note the paper focuses on ingredients and their relationships, not full cooking techniques, procedures, or proportions.
• Several people say the inflated title reduces trust in the work, despite the underlying dataset being “cool” and potentially useful.

Scope, Coverage, and Biases in the Dataset

• The corpus is from 11 sources and a limited set of languages; commenters argue this cannot represent “all” human cooking.
• Missing or underrepresented areas mentioned: African cuisines, Arab/Middle Eastern, Indian/South Asian, some Southeast Asian, and non‑translated French/Italian sources.
• Others point out that English-language recipes for these cuisines do exist, but likely aren’t fully representative or authoritative.
• There is concern that non‑English ingredients were machine‑translated, introducing ambiguity and error.

Ingredients vs Techniques & Compression Claims

• Multiple comments stress that the model captures ingredient co‑occurrence and flavor compatibility more than real “cooking,” which depends heavily on technique and ratios.
• Some argue the space of ingredients and techniques is actually small enough to compress; others demand empirical proof via taste tests and stress that “crib notes” aren’t true mastery.
• People highlight that subtle technique (e.g., fried chicken variations, stew timing, use of acid) is crucial and often missing from algorithmic approaches.

Applications: Flavor Pairing, Substitution, and Tools

• The dataset is seen as promising for:
  • Exploring flavor pairings and ingredient embeddings.
  • Suggesting substitutions or next-best ingredients.
  • Interactive tools such as flavor maps and recipe generators (several linked demos and side projects).
• Some see this as groundwork for specialized cooking models; others think generic LLMs are already “overpowered” for cooking if prompted well.

Cultural & Human Concerns

• Several comments object to omitting major culinary traditions while claiming universality.
• There’s ambivalence about automated or robot cooking: some are excited, others see cooking as core to human culture and creativity and feel automation “robs” something human.

Related Visual & Structural Representations

• A tangential but lively subthread praises schematic/graph-based recipe representations and flowchart-style cookbooks as clearer than traditional prose recipes.