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As someone who works on a program that procedurally generates fictional cultures, including their culinary side, this is a godsend.

It allows me to inspect patterns and the evolution of cuisine over time. This will greatly enhance the accuracy and believeability of the generated cultures.



Very cool that you are generating fictional cultures! This resource only structures Western food cultures (probably because a lot of ancient Eastern & African histories relied on oral traditions rather than written, which has been harder to capture and structure pre-voice tech.) As a result, the patterns you detect and stories you generate will be limited to those Western sources; maybe that could be interesting, but I imagine combining those with other traditions around the world would lead to far more novel fictions.

Have you been able to find good structured data about Asian/African food? If not, it would be cool to figure out a way to start building that sort of database so that your stories draw from a fuller set of information and traditions! I think voice tech and the improvement in transcriptions + gpt3-like tools will help us start capturing and structuring oral histories much more effectively and quickly than ever before.


Getting data on non-Western cultural traits and patterns has been a challenge. I've had to rely primarily on anecdotes and articles found online.

Food history is a relatively recent study, so texts are hard to come by.




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