The space of palatable human food is small. There are only a few thousand ingredients and a few thousand preparation techniques. This could easily be compressed at high fidelity into a model.
IF you need experienced culturally knowledgeable chefs to prepare the food for it to work, then you haven't encoded all the techniques, just crib notes.
There are less than 7 thousand ingredients [1]. Even if you think it's way more than that on account of underrepresented cultures (which does not seem to be the case in this particular study), it's still just a few thousand. Most cuisines use around 50 of them.
[1] https://flowingdata.com/2018/09/18/cuisine-ingredients/
The total number of cooking techniques should be in the hundreds (not thousands), to be generous, even accounting for historical / prehistorical techniques.
So yeah, this checks out.
[1] https://flowingdata.com/2018/09/18/cuisine-ingredients/
Total number of techniques should be in the hundreds (not thousands), to be generous, even accounting for historical / prehistorical techniques.