Commentary: AI is making food more abstract to restaurant-goers; Wendell Berry said it already was in 1989 essay

Brady Brickner-Wood writes for The New Yorker about how the role of food in our lives is becoming increasingly abstract as restaurants begin to sell from AI-generated menus, presenting never-before-seen “horrors” and “slop.” He compares this new trend to the ways Victorians shot stills of their fruit draped with hunted game, and how advertisements in the 2010s drew in millions for the ‘aesthetic value’ of food rather than its actual quality.

“From Minneapolis to Hexentanzplatz, restaurants are plastering menus and promotional materials with A.I.-generated renditions of shrimp scampi and quiche, chicken nuggets and burritos, Italian subs and bacon, egg, and cheeses,” writes Brickner-Wood. “Anyone with even the mildest case of trypophobia—the sense of revulsion from tiny clusters and holes—should avert their eyes.”

Outrage at the recent “food slop” is a protective instinct, Brickner-Wood explains. AI came for music, art and jobs — food was only a matter of time. Food, however, is a physical necessity sustaining human life, so ‘slop’ offends “the materiality of the living in a way that A.I.’s distortions of words and other inanimate objects somehow do not. These images violate science; they mock life itself.”

Brickner-Wood says this trend of disconnection from the food we eat is a new phenomenon, but Kentucky agrarian champion Wendell Berry proposed in his 1989 essay, "The Pleasures of Eating," that the origins of food for the urban consumer were already abstract. Brickner-Wood simply argues that in the age of AI, food production is abstract to us all, and is no longer real, making it completely disconnected from rurality and the processes of farming. 

As Berry wrote: "When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous." Berry, 92, died on Aug. 31. 

Wood explains that many are choosing AI menus to save on costs — it is expensive to take photos, hire a real artist or sacrifice anything from your small business. According to Berry’s interpretation, though, the industrial society is a surrendering of one’s own freedom; it is a relentless system where choice matters less than artificial cravings.