The process of making food models. Japanese 73-year-old craftsman [video]

I have seen this exact video just yesterday and now it popped up here

I’ve watched videos on YouTube only to see it reached the front page hours before.

For certain genres I’m absolutely sure there’s a signal reaching me from HN crowd

What is surprising to me in the article is the price. It is much cheaper than I have thought. It says creating replicas for a full menu can run as high as US$ 9,600. Which is obviously a large chunk of money, but that is quite comparable what i would expect a professional photographer would charge for just photographing the entire menu (especially if I also add the cost of my chefs having to cook all of the items for the photos, and the lost revenue of having to close for a day while we do this, even more if the photographer has to create fake items.)

> We're so easily fooled.

That is not my takeaway. I think the video is so mesmerizing because it is so hard to do this, and the artist in question mastered this hard skill.

Imagine a world where it would be so easy to fool us that kindergarteners would regularly create lifelike replicas of food items. Would we be watching this dude still with the same rapt attention? I don’t think we would.

The fact that it is hard to fool us is why when someone can becomes noteworthy. I believe this is also the basis behind the popularity of realistic cake videos. If anyone could doodle one together during a meeting it wouldn’t be interesting to people.

Then the other thing is: would it really fool anyone? Imagine that as a prank you serve his creation to unsuspecting restaurant costumers. Visualy they are a marvel and thus probably would pass the “look” test, but they would fall apart immediately when people try to raise them to their mouth. The tactile feedback would be totally off. (This is not a ding on the artist! It is a necessary consequence that he is creating replicas which has to keep in perfect visual condition while being shipped and handled. If he would make one which handles perfectly like the real thing that would get messy before it gets to its destination.)

And then if someone sufficiently innatentive would still manage to get it in their mouth without realising that something is off, they would certainly spit it out after the first bite. The taste, the temperature and the mouthfeel would be completely off.

So no, we are not easily fooled. It takes all the skill of an amazing artist to fool us visually, and even then it only works because we are constrained to use only our eyes out of all of the senses we usually employ to judge food.

You’re really going to like the subjective effect of some of these 2D grids of dots rapidly changing colors in a preprogrammed sequence, in lock step with complex patterns of vibrations. [0]

The effect is strangely mesmerizing. It’s called p#*n!

[0] http://www.seethespread.com/

You’d be surprised how much healthier the average eastern lifestyle is compared to the western, at least in terms of bodily health.