The Remembering Hand: Culinary Memory, Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of Knowing
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: A recipe is not the same thing as the knowledge needed to cook it. Written recipes preserveingredients, quantities and sequences, yet cooks also judge readiness through touch, sound,smell and long practice, and they learn this judgement from other people. This paper develops aconceptual framework for studying how culinary knowledge is carried without being writtendown, and for asking what may be lost when it is converted into digital data and AI-generatedtext. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience, the anthropology of skill and food, and scholarship onBengal and Bangladesh, it distinguishes four dimensions of culinary knowledge: recorded,embodied, sensory and social. It argues that memory is reconstructive and selective rather thana store of exact records, that forgetting can be adaptive, and that these features sit comfortablywith practices in which cooks reproduce a dish from judgement rather than from exactmeasurements. It then considers current limits of food-related AI, while rejecting the claim thatAI can never represent sensory information. The paper concludes with a proposed fieldworkdesign centred on a single Bangladeshi dish, intended to test the framework withconsent-based, community-controlled methods.Keywords: culinary memory; tacit knowledge; embodied skill; Bangladeshi cuisine; artificialintelligence; oral transmission; food heritage
Author: Arfatul Islam
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225377335