What Robots Think Of The
Damn Food You're Eating
Robots! They like food too. I guess. I
mean why not?
I always liked the idea of sentient robots
obsessed with food. They wouldn’t necessarily crave cupcakes in the middle of
their workday or salami and BBQ chips (a personal favorite of mine) before
going to bed, but they’d crave the casual rituals people have developed for
consuming food. They'd wonder about the experience of taste!
So I spend a lot of time wondering what
robots think food tastes like -- even though they can’t taste -- just by the
names of foods alone.
In Sad
Robot Stories, I riff on this thought a little in the following
paragraph:
Casserole! What a word!
Robot thought it sounded absolutely beautiful. The word casserole made him
yearn for lips, made him yearn to feel how words, how this word specifically,
rolled off the tongue he didn’t have. He’d never wanted a tongue or lips until
he heard the word casserole. And he had no idea what casserole was, but the
construction of the word! The sound of it all! It was something Robot never
really knew: wholesome. It sounded amazing.
Here are a few more meals and how a robot
might interpret them. I wrote the interpretations in the same third person my
book is written in. So it's not so much in the point-of-view of a robot, as
it's in the point-of-view of some esteral being interpreting a robots thoughts.
Hamsteak (my favorite
meal as a kid): Hamsteak!
What a word!
What a miserable, miserable word.
To Robot, hamsteak sounds like the kind of
meal that might make a human give up on all food. Robot was surprised that the
fear of a food named hamsteak, which sounded to his mechanical listening
devices like suffocating to death under a mound of dirt, didn't make humans
slowly starve themselves to death.
Quiche: Quiche! What a word!
You can't trust quiche, is what Robot thinks he'd think, were he
human.
Quiche sounds like a comfortable chair
that, upon being sat in, sinks too much. And while that experience, like
quiche, is something robot has never experienced, he's certain he wouldn't like
it.
Quiche...
Peas: Peas! What a word!
Peas sound like they'll do. They'll just
do. To Robot, peas are nearly sad, because they sound under appreciated. Like a
day that's not too hot or too cold, yet it's optimal temperature never crosses
your mind.
Peas are "you don't know what you
got till its gone" (and you're hungry).
When robot hears the word
"peas," he becomes suddenly aware of the screws and bolts holding him
together. Suddenly aware of how perfectly they fit his frame, how perfectly
they keep him together.
Whenever Robot hears the word
"peas," he feels bad he doesn't appreciate the screws and bolts
holding him together more.
Pizza: Pizza! What a word!
What a weird word.
Foods cut down in their prime, that's what
pizza sounds like to Robot. Yet the sum of the individual pieces of pizza, the
fragments of separate wholes, becomes a fuller whole in their combination.
Pizza isn't the ocean. Robot imagines that
pizza is like a nice, private pool. Maybe it's in someone's back yard. All your
friends are there and they're smiling. It can
get better than this, but not by much.
Pizza...
Mason Johnson is a writer from Chicago who currently
works full time writing and editing articles for CBS. You can find his fiction
at themasonjohnson.com.
Also, he pets all the cats.
