Why hate replicator????

[pimp]

Hi

I was wondering why people tend to hate replicated food??, because on DS9 everyone seems to go to Quarks bar and order real food (supposedly real, you can never trust Quark lol) and pay good money for it. Is replicated food not that accurate in terms of taste or are people cautious because it is replicated???

Thanks

[Lindley]

Presumably the taste isn't as good.

[Brian]

Which never made sense to me. If a replicator just uses transporter technology to materialize a pattern stored in memory and it doesn't taste like the real thing, what does that say about the efficacy of transporter travel?

If they can't transport a steak that tastes right, why would you step into the chamber yourself?

[Ryan8bit]

I don't think replicator technology is exactly the same as transporter technology. I think that a lot of the food items possibly operate on compressed data in order to store it. Plus, some of the recipes that the replicators base off of could be bad. Or maybe the replicators just aren't top of the line. And Federation replicators were made with healthy choices. Let's be realistic, if the food weren't healthy, everybody in the Federation would be in trouble.

[pimp]

Ryan8bit wrote:

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I don't think replicator technology is exactly the same as transporter technology. I think that a lot of the food items possibly operate on compressed data in order to store it. Plus, some of the recipes that the replicators base off of could be bad. Or maybe the replicators just aren't top of the line. And Federation replicators were made with healthy choices. Let's be realistic, if the food weren't healthy, everybody in the Federation would be in trouble.

Think about the problems people face this day and age, over eating and becoming obese because food is so cheap and easily available and think about what replicators can do and how that would affect society, i mean we would all be fat people in the future.

[darkshadow0001]

I thought it had to due to the fact the replicators didn't work as well as the ones on the Enterprise. Either that, or they were trying to make DS9 more like real life.

[Cyke101]

I think modern day sets a good precedent: there are a lot of people out there who just do not like the taste of prepped or fast food. I myself enjoy a freshly grilled burger freshly rolled from beef, rather than something that was frozen and then fried like McDonald's.

Now, many people in Trek can't taste the difference between replicated food and traditionally made food. But these days, I think there are quite a few people who can't really tell the difference between pre-made fast food and real food (as so many Pizza Hut commercials would have you think about their pasta!).

I also think that if a 21st century person travelled to the 24th century and tried replicated food, that person might miss the differences and nuances. Along those lines, if an 18th century person travelled to modern day and tried out fast food, he might think it was quality nourishment (like HG Wells in Time After Time).

In my mind, I equate this quote (thank you, George Carlin) to a commonly held belief of replicators in the 24th century:

I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed...

I see the need for replicated food, sure, and I probably wouldn't mind. But being a foodie means having a developed palate

darkshadow0001 wrote:

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I thought it had to due to the fact the replicators didn't work as well as the ones on the Enterprise. Either that, or they were trying to make DS9 more like real life.

To be fair, though, TNG did show a decent amount of people who much preferred real substance to replicate matter, ie O'Brien (to Keiko's disgust), Picard's brother, and most-famously Scotty.

[Renvar]

pimp wrote:

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Think about the problems people face this day and age, over eating and becoming obese because food is so cheap and easily available and think about what replicators can do and how that would affect society, i mean we would all be fat people in the future.

You mean we're not already?

Who said Quark serves "real food"? Quark has a replicator behind his bar, and used it to create food and drink regularly. In fact, in "Babel" Quark nearly went out of business because his replicators were down.

As for the whole "Replicators make crappy food" debate, I wouldn't be surprised if it was all psychological. Or maybe there is something to the replication process, like how transporters can run at different resolutions. Replicated food might be created with less precision than is necessary by transporters because it's not necessary to use that much energy to get the same nutrition from artificial food. My guess is, the engineers of replicators considered power consumption a higher priority than exacting taste. They also probably burned their taste buds on too many cups of bad coffee.

[SoM]

Renvar wrote:

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As for the whole "Replicators make crappy food" debate, I wouldn't be surprised if it was all psychological. Or maybe there is something to the replication process, like how transporters can run at different resolutions. Replicated food might be created with less precision than is necessary by transporters because it's not necessary to use that much energy to get the same nutrition from artificial food. My guess is, the engineers of replicators considered power consumption a higher priority than exacting taste. They also probably burned their taste buds on too many cups of bad coffee.

I'm pretty sure replicators run at far lower resolution than transporters (quantum vs. sub-quantum). Also, it's been shown in the past just HOW much memory the transporter buffer takes up, even relative to the vast amounts available on Fed ships - and the transporter buffer is very, very volatile memory to handle the transfer speed, and begins to degrade very quickly most of the time when data is held beyond its' expected life. There's no way they could afford to keep that much memory for the replicators - on top of the lower-resolution, there'd probably need to be a high degree of compression too. And like a moderately-well-done JPEG, it would pass muster for most people, but those who know and care what to "look" for will find the compromises.

[Eric Cheung]

Replicated food has no soul. Ira Stephen Behr thought that a society that invented a replicator would be one step closer to soulessness. I'd say he's not far off. There's something loving and familial about home cooking, whether it's Sisko's bistro or Quark's Bar and Grille or the Klingon Restaurant or Ben Sisko making dinner for Kasidy, Jake-o, and himself.

[JNG]

It seems that there are a small number of people who prefer non-replicated food and beverages, but that the ordinary citizen either cannot taste the difference or hasn't had enough experience with non-replicated material to care (or a measure of both).

The explanation of the technology suggests that it should taste no different than the "real thing." I don't really believe single-bit errors could affect the taste. However, people being people, it is no surprise at all that there would be some who claimed to be able to taste the difference and were likely to give a long speech about how expert they were in the appreciation of "real" food at the drop of a hat and to anyone who'd listen.

[Timo]

...Of course, I'm sure that for a few extra credits, Quark would add soul to an individual's order. All it takes is the push of an additional button.

Aaaanyway. I don't think we've heard people complain about replicated food as much as we've heard people say they like to cook.

Timo Saloniemi

[Deks]

Eric Cheung wrote:

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Replicated food has no soul. Ira Stephen Behr thought that a society that invented a replicator would be one step closer to soullessness. I'd say he's not far off. There's something loving and familial about home cooking, whether it's Sisko's bistro or Quark's Bar and Grille or the Klingon Restaurant or Ben Sisko making dinner for Kasidy, Jake-o, and himself.

One of the reasons I couldn't stand DS9 much was because of it's religious undertones.

Replicated food being hated?
Hardly ... it's just that the writers apparently wanted to insinuate that to some people, replicated food tastes differently from home-cooked one ... nothing more, nothing less.
And it was explicitly stated that the food tastes the same all the time ... it's the 'picky' ones who complain simply because it wasn't 'home-cooked' and don't want to potentially 'insult' their parents cooking? - as stupid as it may be.

It wasn't until Ds9 it was dumb-ed down and modified to the extent of being 'hated' where everyone went to Quarks for a meal.

When you are on a star-ship ... it's easier to replicate a meal instead of going to the airponics bay and take something from a limited supply.

There is no reason that people would stop making home-cooked meals because of the replicator or that people in turn would hate replicated food because for some of them it tastes 'differently'.

A 'soullessness' society? Give me a break.

[Eric Cheung]

But I think Behr's point is that once you have replicators, you're only a few steps away from

the people in Wall-E.

[Eric Cheung]

Deks wrote:

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One of the reasons I couldn't stand DS9 much was because of it's religious undertones.

Replicated food being hated?
Hardly ... it's just that the writers apparently wanted to insinuate that to some people, replicated food tastes differently from home-cooked one ... nothing more, nothing less.
And it was explicitly stated that the food tastes the same all the time ... it's the 'picky' ones who complain simply because it wasn't 'home-cooked' and don't want to potentially 'insult' their parents cooking? - as stupid as it may be.

It wasn't until Ds9 it was dumb-ed down and modified to the extent of being 'hated' where everyone went to Quarks for a meal.

When you are on a star-ship ... it's easier to replicate a meal instead of going to the airponics bay and take something from a limited supply.

There is no reason that people would stop making home-cooked meals because of the replicator or that people in turn would hate replicated food because for some of them it tastes 'differently'.

A 'soullessness' society? Give me a break.

I wasn't talking about it having less soul in a strictly religious sense (in fact I'm an athiest), perhaps "humanity" would be a better term. I just meant that just because it's easier to press a button to make a meal that tastes exactly the same doesn't make it better. Eating is a social experience, and part of that experience includes the aromas and anticipation associated with a cake baking in an oven, the pride of the chef having created, modified, or figured out some stellar recipe, the idea that making something for someone else it an act of love, that it connects us to our ancestors, to the romance in the world. And it's probably much more comforting to people that are so far from home to have something that reminds them of it than to press a button on a replicator. Food is more than the sum of its atoms. If it wasn't, one might as well eat MRE rations.