BANGKOK — Hopscotching the globe as Thailand’s prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra repeatedly encountered a distressing problem: bad Thai food.
Too often, she found, the meals she sampled at Thai restaurants abroad were unworthy of the name, too bland to be called genuine Thai cooking. The problem bothered her enough to raise it at a cabinet meeting.
Her political party has since been thrown out of office, in a May military coup, but her initiative in culinary diplomacy lives on.
At a gala dinner at a ritzy Bangkok hotel on Tuesday the government will unveil its project to standardize the art of Thai food — with a robot.
Diplomats and dignitaries have been invited to witness the debut of a machine that its promoters say can scientifically evaluate Thai cuisine, telling the difference, for instance, between a properly prepared green curry with just the right mix of Thai basil, curry paste and fresh coconut cream, and a lame imitation.
A boxy contraption filled with sensors and microchips, the so-called e-delicious machine scans food samples to produce a chemical signature, which it measures against a standard deemed to be the authentic version.
Sirapat Pratontep, an expert in nanotechnology who led the development of a machine that evaluates Thai food against a government standard.Credit Giorgio Taraschi for The New York Times
The government-financed Thai Delicious Committee, which oversaw the development of the machine, describes it as “an intelligent robot that measures smell and taste in food ingredients through sensor technology in order to measure taste like a food critic.”
Oh - my - god. Just when you think you have heard it all Thailand never fails to amaze.
Yes - it's true that Thai cuisine in other countries is simply not the same, as I found out when I asked at a Thai place in Hull if they did Larb! But neither do we have genuine Indian or Chinese cuisine. We get what is perceived as being acceptable to us foreigners. Just as us farang get a watered down version of Thai food in Thailand.
I just wish that Thai politicians - legitimate or otherwise - would get it into their heads that there are much more important things to do. And while they are at it maybe they could ensure that visitors to Thailand could find authentic Yorkshire puddings and mushy peas. After all - that must surely be important to them?