My impression is that gourmet food has become more interesting as the need for it also to be filling has decreased
Um, gourmet food is almost by definition food that is skilled labor-intensive to produce. For an example of technological superstimulus applied to food think mass-produced food that is sweeter/more satisfying then anything in the ancestral environment, a.k.a., fast/junk food.
See here for the standard examples of superstimuli as applied to food and video games.
I’m not suggesting that gourmet food is a technologically applied superstimulus, I’m suggesting that cheap mass-produced food is a bit like one and that maybe its availability has enabled the flourishing of cuisine-as-quasi-artform.
This is not exactly what you asked for but I think it’s still relevant—it’s not so very different from what Viliam suggested could conceivably happen with sexbots. Hence my first paragraph.
Um, gourmet food is almost by definition food that is skilled labor-intensive to produce.
I don’t think so. Gourmet food nowadays is:
tasty in a complex way
unusual
That requires creativity and a sense of style much more than it requires a lot of skilled labour. In a way it’s like fashion—fashionable clothes could require complex production, but they don’t have to. Neither fashion nor gourmet cooking is about being “skilled-labour intensive”.
Um, gourmet food is almost by definition food that is skilled labor-intensive to produce. For an example of technological superstimulus applied to food think mass-produced food that is sweeter/more satisfying then anything in the ancestral environment, a.k.a., fast/junk food.
See here for the standard examples of superstimuli as applied to food and video games.
I’m not suggesting that gourmet food is a technologically applied superstimulus, I’m suggesting that cheap mass-produced food is a bit like one and that maybe its availability has enabled the flourishing of cuisine-as-quasi-artform.
This is not exactly what you asked for but I think it’s still relevant—it’s not so very different from what Viliam suggested could conceivably happen with sexbots. Hence my first paragraph.
[EDITED to fix a ridiculous typo.]
I don’t think so. Gourmet food nowadays is:
tasty in a complex way
unusual
That requires creativity and a sense of style much more than it requires a lot of skilled labour. In a way it’s like fashion—fashionable clothes could require complex production, but they don’t have to. Neither fashion nor gourmet cooking is about being “skilled-labour intensive”.
In other words it requires skilled labor where the relevant skills are creativity and a sense of style.
Skilled labour, yes. Labour-intensive, no.