Now we're cooking.
Exactly.
See, good thing you had the apron on.
Yeah. This protects me from the flames.
The American food system wastes about
20 pounds of food per person per month.
That's as much as twenty one-pound bags full of food.
One way to help people waste a little bit less
could lie in novel food combinations
created by a supercomputer.
We're here in the Bon Appetit test kitchen
at One World Trade Center.
We're testing out Watson.
I'm most interested in this as a point
in minimizing food waste.
Why'd you decide to develop Chef Watson?
We originally developed Watson as part of this
demonstration of our
natural language processing abilities.
We built the system that could compete
at the game show Jeopardy and win.
This is Jeopardy! The IBM Challenge.
Watson?
What is 'Shoe'?
You are right.
Shortly after that a bunch of scientists and researchers
asked the question, "What's next?"
Why not pick an area that everybody can relate to?
And certainly everyone can relate to food.
We all need to eat.
We do.
So the 10,000 recipes that were published
in Bon Appetit were all ingested into Watson.
Well, when I think about who I should ask for a good
recipe, I think—a computer.
But computers are the new brains.
So you can go to a website and type in whatever
random food you have left in your house
that's about to go bad and Watson will spit out a recipe
for some way to combine that food before it rots.
So you've come up with something today for us that's
an example of how we can combine things
we might not normally think to combine.
When I was playing around with it I had friends that,
it was like, tell me what's in your refrigerator right now.
And I would just plug it in and then
Watson would tell me what I can make out of that.
So what is the flavor combinations?
The three kind of crazy elements in the stir fry are
rye whiskey, apple cider, and plantains.
These are fried so they read like chips.
Yeah it tastes like a potato chip.
Let's get rid of all this and just eat the fried plantains.
Okay.
Video over.
Yeah.
I wonder if Watson likes plantain chips as much as I do.
I like a chef who has personality.
Is Watson more of a Mark Bittman
or more of a Paula Deen?
Watson is more of a regular person.
More regular than me?
Yes.
Who is kind of, not necessarily in chef white's but
more in regular clothes and is standing at their fridge
just trying to figure out, "What am I going to do tonight?"
How am I going to put dinner on the table?
What the hell, this is so much weird stuff.
Why did I buy this? What am I going to do with it?
I can't throw it away because I have so much guilt
already about the wasteful life that I'm living.
Am I even productive to society at all?
And with stir fries you want to just keep them moving.
Whoah!
Hot carrots.
That's very impressive I'm sure to houseguests.
It is. It's kind of fun.
I have all kinds of houseguests.
Well you should try this.
Just add that in.
Watson just said, "Plantains,"
and you decided, "Why don't I fry them?"
Okay. Cheers.
Is this a thing?
It is now. We just started. It's called fork toast.
To me, Watson looks like Santa Claus.
I could see that.
Especially at the holiday time.
Mmhmm.
Giving a gift
of creativity and minimizing food waste.
Does it do any one ingredient things?
Where you're just like, "Grapes."
And it says, "Grapes."
If your dish type is fresh fruit,
and the ingredient that you provide is grapes,
it will say, "Grapes."