How realistic are replicated food + the holodeck?

How "real" does replicated food taste? How "real" does the holodeck feel?

 

I'm guessing not so great, because every once in awhile in a couple episodes, you always seem to hear something along the lines "not as good as the real thing."

 

Well, everything certainly feels 100% real on the holodeck. Replicated food tastes real for the most part, though in some cases it can be differentiated from the real thing, depending on what the food is and how discernable the person's palette is.

 

Or then these people are just opposed to the idea of replicated and holographic things out of principle, and thus perceive imperfections even where there are none.

Or then replicated food is perfect, and people find perfect food unsatisfactory, at least in the long term. One perfect meal after another can easily leave one yearning for imperfections!

Timo Saloniemi

 

I suppose it could be like comparing canned fruit to fresh fruit - you can tell the difference but it's the same stuff treated differently.

I never understood how holographic food worked - wasn't it suggested that certain things in the holodeck were replicated so you could take them out and/or eat them in TNG; but if this were the case then Voyager wouldn't need replicator rations - then there's the whole, "Harry, It's holograpic wine!"

 

The holodeck has built in replicators, so it can make food and water when it needs to.

 

Don't know but those Universal Translators drive me bananas.

Never a glitch, always translates into the king's english-perfect. Geez

 

Except for units which magically stay in the native language despite the numbers being converted to english.

 

I still maintain thats for our benefit. If it was real, the language the characters are speaking is something completely different and not neccesarily English (despite what TOS said in numerous episodes). I mean if we went back to the early 1800s and spoke English to someone who spoke English of that day, it would be like hearing a foreign language. Sorry to meander off topic.

 

I suppose everything would always taste exactly the same, because each time you order a meal it's a carbon copy (literally) of the meal they originally sampled from reality.

Real food tastes different almost every time because you're getting it from different chefs, or the ingredients you use aren't exactly the same.

People complaining about synthetic food not tasting the same is just something the writers threw in there as a psychological reaction, similar to how, like previously mentioned, we complain about say frozen vegetables vs. fresh vegetables.

I don't think it's a flavor issue, more of a mental conditioning... Like when you say, "This cake is great, but nobody fixes it like ______."

 

Of course, even if the food were the exact same every time, our mouths would not be. Would two identical meals taste the same on two different days? Probably not. Our senses are highly subjective and relative, not objective and absolute.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I suppose the possibility exists that higher-end replicators could introduce some degree of randomness to the replicated dish, to ensure that two subsequent dishes don't taste 100% the same (maybe more like 98% similar). That would keep meals from becoming quite so boring.

My understanding of the term "tastes replicated" has always implied to me that replicator patterns are not 100% correct, relative to the original; rather, they are a lower molecular "resolution" compared to the original. The cargo bay transporters work on a similar principle - they cannot be used to transport living lifeforms (unless they're modified to do so), because their quantum resolution is coarser than the personnel transporters the people use. I can't imagine that the transporter patterns required to keep perfect copies of each of the thousands of dishes could even exist on the Enterprise.

 

But is there any canon indication of such low resolution in anything, be it cargo transporters or replicators?

In "Dagger of the Mind", van Gelden was able to beam up pretending to be cargo. Lore survived his trip through a cargo transporter just fine in "Datalore". I'm at loss to find any contrary examples, or any mention of the possibility of adjusting transporter resolution in any direction.

And I find it hard to believe that the taste of a good meal could be properly reproduced at any resolution below that required for replicating/transporting a living being. The molecules involved are quite intricate - their complex and appetizing taste is in many ways directly related to the fact that they represent once-living tissue.

Timo Saloniemi

 

^ In "The Mind's Eye," when Geordi is getting ready to attack in the cargo bay, you can hear Picard talking in the background. I believe he says something about the cargo transporters always introducing a minor flaw or somesuch into the cargo it transports so that it can always be traced back to its source.

With cargo that would work fine, but I would think that if a person tried to transport through a transporter so programmed, a seemingly minor imperfection introduced could have dire consequences.

 

Nothing's perfect. I believe that the replicated food and the holodeck are more than great, but just knowing they're not for real makes some people say: "not so good as the real thing".

 

Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short sf story of the near future, "The Food of the Gods," about a totally-replicated meat that was a big seller, but which raised certain ethical questions. Perahps I should leave it at that.

 

They also had a glitch in the DS9 episode Little Green Men

 

The 1800s? Different slang and a few minor things but the 1800s wasn't THAT long ago. Go back to the 14 or 1500s and you'd have more of a point, though you'd still be able to get by with a bit of frustration.

One could also make the argument that the information/communication age, high literacy rates, and the emergence of English as a truly world-wide lingua-franca might help to slow down it's grammatical change. New words and slang would of course continue to develop, but language is more likely to be "backwards compatible" in the future, at least more than it's been historically.