Digital Lawyering: AI and Cooking (June 2025)
“AI is already defining our next bite.”
—Alon Wise, “Food and AI” (The Food Programme, 2025)
One of the most common ways my students use AI in their personal lives is as a cooking companion. They use AI to experiment with new recipes (with mixed results). They use AI to generate shopping lists. They also use it to map out an entire week’s worth of meals based on what’s currently in their fridge, freezer, and pantry.
Here are some materials that show that they’re not alone.
Enjoy!
—Patrick
AI Reading: How AI is Revolutionizing Restaurants, From Smart Menus to Dynamic Pricing by Regan Stephens (Food & Wine, 2025)
Sample Insights:
“‘AI is changing menu development, giving chefs instant access to scientific flavor insights,’ according to [Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the chef/owner of over 50 restaurants around the globe, including Four Twenty Five in New York City]. ‘With a full database of food chemistry and flavor synergies, chefs can input ingredients like white asparagus and receive tailored recommendations for flavor pairings,’ he says.”
“‘Ben Triola, executive chef at The Chloe in New Orleans, sees AI as a source of novel inspiration, providing ‘new ideas to riff on, producing images and ideas foreign to classically trained chefs by pulling ingredient pairings and plating ideas from across the world,’ he says, though adding, ‘The human ability to translate that into something our guests want will be crucial to staying relevant in the emerging culinary landscape.’”
“Hana Dreiling, co-founder of Holey Grail Donuts in Hawaii and Los Angeles, says AI tools have already helped her business with inventory management, scheduling, and financial reporting over the last few years. But it’s also a secret weapon when it comes to sustainability, “not just in the kitchen, but in farming too,’ she says. ‘AI-driven tools have helped us fine-tune our supply chain, shift to a quarterly menu, and reduce waste, all while celebrating our core ingredient: taro root, hand-harvested in Hawaii.’”
AI Listening: AI in the Food Chain (The Food Chain, 2025)
Sample Insights:
“The AI can tell me that cherry and Tonka beans go well together, because there is the same molecule inside. I can see, for example, that asparagus and pistachio might go well together. I’m not going to ask the AI to create a [full] course for me. I’m most of the time going to it with ideas of one ingredient, a second ingredient. I can then ask it: ‘Can you help me to find a good idea to connect these ingredients?’”
“Another great example is the research and development time for new products has been brought down massively. I think it was Kraft Heinz said that it used to take them three to five years to develop a new product, at which point consumers don’t even want that product anymore because the industry has moved on. [That same product development] can now happen in three to six months”
AI Watching: Can A.I. Make Pasta Better Than a Pro Cook (NYT Cooking, 2023)
Sample Insights:
“Last year, as ChatGPT was making the rounds, we started to wonder: how good are the recipe development capabilities of artificial intelligence? And could AI develop an entire Thanksgiving meal? So, we worked with ChatGPT. I told it a little bit about myself. It kept the Indian flavors, but it really put me in a box. It developed a Thanksgiving menu tailored to me—naan stuffing, orange cake with cream cheese frosting, and a very, very dry turkey. What we ended up finding out was that AI can generate recipes that look good in theory, but in practice, don’t really work.”
“But now, ChatGPT has learned more. It has read more of the internet.
Each episode, we will prompt ChatGPT to come up with a recipe. Then, we’ll bring in one of our recipe developers to test that recipe and come up with their own version. We’ll see which one is better. But the twist is [that recipe developers] can only change three things about the original AI recipe. It’s a test of how good artificial intelligence is and [whether human chefs can take that output and turn it into something even better].”
AI Exercise: “From Text to Table”
Step 1: Type into you chatbot of choices clear descriptions of at least four items in your refrigerator. (If you’d like to go try out the multi-modal capabilities of AI, you can also simply upload a picture—but be sure to think through the privacy implications of sharing that image with whatever platform you are using, particularly if you keep medicines or other personal material in your refrigerator.)
Step 2: Add any dietary restrictions or taste preferences you might have.
Step 3: Ask your chatbot to create multiple breakfast options, lunch options, snack options, and dessert options.
Step 4 (Optional): Have your chatbot write the options in the style of a famous chef or food personality that you like.
Step 5: Evaluate the options and see if any is worth trying.
Here’s a brief account from when one of my students tried something similar:
“I decided to use Chat GPT to help me make a meal with the leftovers I have in my fridge. (I was particularly grateful for the help because I'm coming home from a weekend trip away and did not have any ideas for dinner!)
The recipe ChatGPT came up with was a turkey and kale rice bowl, which reminds me of some of the HelloFresh meals that my boyfriend likes to make me. For fun, I had ChatGPT rewrite the recipe in the style of Molly Baz. The recipe was mostly the same but used some of her silly quips (e.g., ‘a glug of olive oil’ or ‘go rogue with pasta or couscous’). Changing the tone of the recipe did not change the fundamentals of the meal very much, but I would probably still use the Molly Baz style. I'd recommend trying this exercise! It shows how, in my view, ChatGPT can be extremely practical.”