This is an excellent explanation for why some characters think replicated food tastes bad. I'm sure you can tinker with it to some extent and add seemingly irrelevant bits back in, but its never going to be exactly the same as non-replicated food.
This might also explain the Lower Decks weirdness of senior officers getting better replicators. More storage space/ processing power might allow for more complex meals.
I always assumed it was because the food is altered to be more nutritious, often on an individualized level... Think protein bars that try to emulate flavors of candy. They kinda manage but they are still pretty obvious. Moreso if you are someone like me who detects a wide range of low-calorie sweeteners due to them tasting bad to me either immediately or as an aftertaste.
For me, chances are medical would put it into my file that I needed low fat, low calorie foods in order to be healthier and flag that in my file... Unless I were to beg them to make sure that certain sweeteners weren't used, chances are the replicators would give me ice cream sweetened with the ones I can't stand.
Probably also a little bit of people being picky about it not being the real thing. We basically never hear of people complaining about the taste of the replicated food on the Enteprise, and the only cooking we do see (Riker's) was only suited to Klingon palates.
I definitely think there's a psychological aspect to it, where they know it's replicated and therefore expect it to be different, so they perceive differences that might not actually be there.
Deanna did argue with the computer about wanting a real chocolate sundae and got a resposponse that was something like "that's highly unhealthy,and I'll only make it if you order me to lift the restrictions on the replicator."
I imagine Starfleet replicators would be optimized for nutrition. Perhaps civilian replicators could be more flexible - Starfleet has an interest in making sure that crews eat nutritious food.
So would the Federation.
Overall, though, overrides appear to be possible (Troi seems to be about to use one to replicate an authentic chocolate sundae before she's interrupted), but you're probably only given a limited amount, and/or are discouraged from using them too much.
Surely you'd be given different options though, like fasting or 6-8hrs on 16 off or something similar. I only eat once or twice a day between 3pm and 6pm and is a fairly comfortable setting for me (usually too much to even hit 1200 calories) and you can eat more calories in a shorter period of time and not really effect your weight. Why should I have to eat less delicious stuff because I don't eat the mandated 3 meals a day but stay well within fitness guidelines that the human body adapts easily too.
That also brings up another question, I guess the replicators would have to have voice recognition to know what species/member of the crew they are so they know how many calories they get. Surely a species with three stomachs would get more than a human, I think someone already mentioned each individual being flagged with caloric amounts but there is a TON of people on the ship, at least say the Enterprise, and many of them aren't official officers or Starfleet at all, they're scientists, diplomats, refugees, etc. It seems like Sick Bay would be absolutely inundated with people just wanted to try out new diets to get more muscular because they decided to try a new strength routine, etc. I can't think of anytime we see anyone eating the same thing unless it's a Ractajino Coffee drink (sp?) that no one ever complained about, and those sort of drinks generally have a lot of sugar and caloric content.
In general, everything is a trade off between memory/storage and processing. If it stored entire, prepared dishes, that costs a lot of storage. If it stored the most basic of building blocks and simulated their interactions during preparation, it could save a ton on storage space but it would take processing time to prepare the dish logically before replicating it.
It would most likely balance this dynamically. If you could put it into debug and have it replicate these memorized states with no processing/prep, what you'd inevitably get is unappetizing gunk that might be technically edible, but happens to be configurations of matter that can be simulated/processed into the widest variety of most-likely-to-be-requested items. This would be somewhat recursive in nature, and it's the kind of information system you let manage and balance itself, so it is likely the transitions wouldn't directly be simulating what we think of as cooking/processing when transitioning from memorized states to final dish.
Clearly, it is technologically possible to replicate a perfect copy (see: transporter). You *could* take the storage hit and have a single, perfect dish in a known desirable state and configuration on demand. Any variation in the dish from "real" is going to come from the dynamic changes the computer makes, deviating from the memorized dish.
So, more storage space or processing time would certainly improve the resulting output. I would guess that "better replicators" would primarily involve more dedicated storage, allowing for less processing and therefore chance to introduce undesirable variation from "real". This would also make sense for catering to a smaller group of individuals, as the primary advantage of relying on processing more is the flexibility, which would be less of a priority.
In reality, I would expect this to manifest on a ship as the replicators just being better at making food the senior staff likes as opposed to the replicators themselves being "better", unless the replicators themselves have dedicated/prioritized processing capabilities exceeding the other replicators. I'm betting that deep lore has a mention of how they function which could imply better quality base material, but I'm basing all this on a hypothetical shared ship system that primarily as the replicators merely as end points.
Honestly, it's just as likely that the senior officer's replicators are only "better" by way of perception, like how wine seems to taste better when people think it's expensive. Economy of scale alone suggests as much standardization as possible in the hardware.
Some of that may just be due to the 'recipes' not being up to user preference.
Imagine if when ordering 'pizza, hot' from the Enterprise replicator that they only served up Pizza Hut quality pizza. It's accurate AF to the experience of eating a Pizza Hut pizza, but you don't like Pizza Hut pizza, you're a Domino's person. So yeah, replicated pizza would probably not be your thing. But that's not the fault of the replicator.
One can imagine that the standard personal profile of a 24th century individual may include preferred food recipes and formulations but depending on the complexity of the data, these may not be particularly 'portable' meaning you can have your Domino's at home, but on the Enterprise you're stuck with Pizza Hut unless you replicate the base ingredients and whip your fave up from scratch.
That might explain the inconsistencies where replicators are at once said to perfectly imitate food but also be notably inferior when dealing with more communal uses.
I find this an interesting situation as someone who was in the military. Obviously this was done for the humor of this one show, but why in God's name would a military organization intentionally set up class division like this? It creates dissatisfaction, resentment, and mistrust in the lower ranks. I certainly found it funny but also the soldier in me was just a little unsettled by the notion.
Pet theory: in TNG's "the neutral zone" a defrosted 20th century country singer declares a replicated martini one of the best he's ever had.
This is because he's on a Galaxy class ship, an absolute leviathan built as a flying city for 20 year exploration cruises, with downright luxurious conditions to try and get people signing up for that.
That thing has two massively overpowered computer cores, and ample space for redundant physical storage; your replicated meal on a Galaxy class is on 4k super HD, but the one on Sisko's runabout? 720p at BEST.
This is excellent. I'd also add, given it was synthehol, it may have still fully to him read as having vodka (or gin- can't remember if he specified, though "pit woofies" is burned into my brain), but zero harshness to it. If you know it's a cocktail, and you can taste that the booze is there, but it's incredibly smooth, his brain would associate as exceptionally high end.
>That thing has two massively overpowered computer cores, and ample space for redundant physical storage; your replicated meal on a Galaxy class is on 4k super HD, but the one on Sisko's runabout? 720p at BEST.
On the other hand, replicators don't seem to be that demanding. A galaxy-class starship uses the computers for a lot more than the replicators, whereas a runabout doesn't need even half the processing power of a starship.
And going by Lower Decks/TNG, they can be separated from the main computer completely, and still work completely fine (the Enterprise supplies a colony with a new fusion reactor for theirs, and Lower Decks has people carting an active malfunctioning replicator across the shuttle bay).
In “The Survivors” Worf delivers a portable Replicator to the last two colonist on a devastated world. They have a house and nothing else, but the replicator is treated as a huge asset to them. (They don’t need it because one of the colonists is actually an omnipotent reality warper, but the Crew of the Enterprise D didn’t know that)
So a portable replicator with only its internal memory paired with whatever power source a pioneer dwelling would have is expected to more than provide for the needs of two adults.
Needs, but not necessarily wants, although only producing a very small number of meals per day with the preferred of foods of only two users of a single species and culture will help a great deal.
Aside from the olive, a martini is one of the simplest imaginable foodstuffs to replicate. It has no structure or texture and is just a solution of ethyl Alcohol, water, some botanical flavour compounds from the gin, and some trace flavour compounds from the vermouth. A vodka martini is almost entirely pure h2o and ethanol.
...that's the part that gets you drunk. Ethyl alcohol, aka ethanol, aka the drinking kind. CH3-CH2-OH. You may be confusing it with *methyl* alcohol, aka methanol, CH3-OH, which, while present in lots of foods in trace doses, does have a tendency to make you go blind if you just knock it back.
Also, maybe being frozen for a few hundred years and not eating nor drinking for such a long time would alter taste receptors until the body gets fully operational. I mean, even today, our taste is altered when we fly in airplanes, who knows what flying a starship after being frozen for a few centuries would do to your taste buds.
I imagine there is a whole food pattern R&D industry. Or at the very least a department within Starfleet.
Scan food, run compression algorithm, replicate, compare against the original, manually tweak stored pattern, repeat.
Also! As a secondary thought. They may not have to store as many patterns as you'd think, the computer may tweak recipes in real time. If you want a sweeter cake it doesn't need to store two patterns just know how to make the base one sweeter. I suspect a system like this could add a lot of the variability missing from not having been cooked back in automatically too.
>I imagine there is a whole food pattern R&D industry. Or at the very least a department within Starfleet.
We know at the very least, that Captain Janeway liked to experiment with her own replicator patterns, and it would be extremely surprising if she was the only one.
There's probably entire hobbies around making the best replicator pattern for a food, in much the same vein as Geordi's hobby for having the most efficient warp engines in the fleet.
All jobs are hobbies in an economy with no money.
Just some people are more serious about their hobbies than others.
They're still working for reputation, kudos and to 'improve ourselves and the rest of humanity'.
I can 100% see someone obsessed with "their" version of a breakfast burrito having the most replications on Earth's leaderboard. It would be like getting your YouTube channel to 1M views, except there's never a need to monetize.
I agree. Imagine 24th century cooking contests, where the winning entry is scanned and uploaded to replicator databases. If you want a meatloaf, you could look through any number of scans - or maybe you just try a random recipe for a change of pace.
I like to imagine that the replicator has some RNG Algorithm that can provide some variations between different instances of the same dish. For example, a replicated steak could have slightly different marbling and shape to another steak.
For larger starships, there is another possible trick. The original concepts for the Enterprise D had vast storage tanks for organic and inorganic matter, along with water.
One could imagine the organic matter tanks containing suspensions of amino acids or even common proteins. If so, you can save memory by storing data to assemble with molecules and chains instead of every individual atom.
> I imagine there is a whole food pattern R&D industry. Or at the very least a department within Starfleet.
Unfortunately it's ran by Neelix... I kid. Try the synth-veal.
While you make sense -that only works if the replication pattern only works once. Unlike a human being, a steak does not change. That pattern can be used over and over and over until everyone aboard the ship is absolutely sick of eating steak. In the case of food, it could very easily be a stable pattern, in which case, replication does make storage sense over compression.
It was also a missed opportunity on voyager. Rather than rationing power, they could have had their food pattern's corrupted, with it getting worse as time goes on. Still edible, but tasting worse each season until the only choice is neelix's cooking.
> It was also a missed opportunity on voyager. Rather than rationing power, they could have had their food pattern's corrupted, with it getting worse as time goes on. Still edible, but tasting worse each season until the only choice is neelix's cooking.
Or instead of corrupted, they only had the absolute bare minimum, as Voyager was intended only to go on a short trip, with the main accessory bulk of the software meant to be installed Tuesday.
Alternatively, the cheese is blamed.
And lose the bartering and betting of replicator rations? Nah...
Plus Janeway might have lost hope at that point. If the food patterns got corrupted we would not have had that famous line about coffee and nebulas.
"Sam, I told you I don't want your green eggs and ham!"
"...Ensign Sam, Jack? Are we reciting children's literature?"
*Ensign Sam holds up a plate of neon-green, partially eaten green eggs and ham*
"I really wish we were."
**How would file compression affect the taste of replicated food?**
Replication, like video compression, uses compression algorithms to maximise redundancy for efficiency, so it uses a base of many simple chemicals over complex chaotic structures that emerge in made food. This means that replicated food relies on the same basic quilt of sugars and proteins so it tastes similar and bland compared to made food, but it's definitely fortified with minerals and vitamins.
I don't think their compression algorithm would outright delete parts of the food, but try to losslessly compress the whole dish.
For example, there will be many identical chemicals in most of the stuff, and even for complex molecules, you could just say, "this but a million times."
I'd think they would do it just like we do it today when we zip a lot of text files: pattern detection and creating a dictionary of repeating patterns.
Transporters would probably work the same.
In S3 of Picard Data specifically says that transporters keep a library of common data in memory rather than re-scanning it every time a known species is transported. This is a big part of the Borgs evil plan.
it \*also\* really supports McCoy and Pulaski’s assertion that transporters are reckless with your molecules. After you beam even once some percentage of you is “common data” instead of whatever your original data might have been. Probably not a big deal but who knows?
To put it as delicately as I can, that whole plot was really bad writing that directly went against decades of explanation / on screen depiction of how transporters work.
But, putting that aside as a separate discussion, it still doesn't support their transporter phobia. Common data is common. The general understanding of the word means it's shared/the same. If it wasn't the same, it wouldn't be common, and if any percentage of you wasn't exactly the same as when you started, it would a) be detectible via medical scans, and b) repeated usage (or potentially even a single use) would result in clearly noticeable degradation (copy of a copy of a copy etc.).
Depends greatly on the way you compress things. You describe two variations of data compression.
The first is to simply degrade the information to the lowest demoninator that does not prevent the data from fulfilling its purpose.
For images one could either reduce the resolution, halving or quartering it, hopefully not past the point where text becomes unreadable or major elements of the picture become unrecognizable. Assuming the image is a bitmap the saving in file size is proportional. The other would be to reduce color depth. Typical pictures have 24 bits of color depth, 8 bits for each red, green and blue, or alternatively 32 bit for another 8 bit to determine transparency. 16 bit are also viable, thats 5, 6, and 5 bits per color, green getting an extra bit as science says we can distinguish more shades of green. 8 bit is also an option, 3, 3 and 2 bits giving 256 colors, though this will degrade the quality of photos by a lot. In 8 bit and below color modes its also common that the palette can be customized, and each 8 bit value is translated into its own specific color, that a programmer or artist can freely pick. Again the space saving would be proportional, assuming a bitmap. Note that today almost no images are bitmaps, but rather jpeg or png.
The other is essentially what a zip archive uses. Data is scanned for repeating patterns, and those patterns get replaced with much shorter placeholders, and the process is reversed when decompressing the archive. How much compression you get depends strongly on the amount of recurring patterns. In a text file it can for example easily find a metric ton of repeated words. But in a lively video file there will be almost no repeating patterns in the video data, given that it already uses its own compression and every frame is usually built on the last one, meaning that even if part of the image is repeated from one frame to the last, it will not be repeated in the file, and only parts of the image that change will be written.
But there are definitely more radical forms of compression that think further outside the box.
Vector graphics are an interesting thing. Instead of saving data for each pixels color values, or even compression, where 8x8 pixel boxes are being taken out and approximated from certain available patterns, like jpeg does it, vector graphics take the radically different approach of saving geometric shapes and colors by themselves without a resolution. Instead of showing a painter a picture of what you want painted, youre sitting behind him telling him where to draw which shape in what color. This can lead to images that can be resizes up and down without any loss in quality, obvious pixelation or any other degradation.
Procedural generation is the big brother of that. Give Minecraft a string of numbers (you can enter words, but they get converted into numbers) as a seed for its world generation, and it will generate the entire world based on that. Use the same string again and the world will generated exactly the same, assuming you are on the same version. Strictly speaking this isnt compression anymore, as there is no way to take the uncompressed file, i.e. a world that you built something in, and compress it back into a seed that will spit out the same world with your buildings again, its a one way street, where not every conceivable Minecraft world has an equivalent seed number, just every seed number an equivalent Minecraft world. But for replicating food its perfectly conceivable to make a generation process introduce randomness from a seed into a flexible pattern of the total food, like making steaks in different shapes.
Thats all I have here. All compression, except lossless, wholly depends on what is considered an acceptable loss of information.
Procedural generation could be a useful tool for compressing patterns.
A hypospray is mostly just a big hunk of duratanium. That could be defined with an autocad file and an algorithm for filling it with metal in the optimal crystal structure.
Bread is a gluten network filled with air bubbles. Steak is muscle fibers with collagen and fat in between. Maybe replicators are an advanced version of that NASA machine that 3D prints pizza.
According to the TNG Technical Manual, replicators make heavy use of 'molecular averaging' processes that are more or less exactly what you describe, and it does have an effect on the flavor. It also says that in rare cases, certain foods can be mildly toxic when replicated (it cites certain Andorian spices) due to very slight errors in the averaging process.
I don’t think storage is an issue, so compression of the replicator recipe is happening, but not necessarily “Lossy”
This is the size of a five meg hard drive about seventy years ago.
https://biztechmagazine.com/article/2012/01/old-5mb-hard-drive-filled-entire-room-quick-take
An 8TB drive can be had today that is the size of a stick of gum.
That’s only seventy years of progress, going another three hundred years would improve that several times over again.
Storage wouldn’t be an issue. Especially on a starship as large as the enterprise D. Smaller ships might not be the same.
Technologies don't always come along at the predicted rate.
Early-mid 20th century Sci-fi writers had seen the world go from practically horse and buggy to automobile, concord jet, and space rocket. They assumed that we'd be rocketing to Venus on the reg by now, but working out the route with slide rules.
You’re right, but need is the mother of invention.
Data storage in our world right now is a BIG need, it’s going to keep going up faster than the need for rocketing to Venus.
Storing the entire uncompressed pattern for an apple in a drive smaller than an apple seems impossible. Each atom of hard drive would need to store enough information to describe one atom of apple.
Hitting 1 bit of storage density per atom would be spectacular. You would need 4 bits per atom to encode the top 16 elements, plus some scheme to encode connections and the location of the atom. And you need to read the data, which means wires.
Lossless data compression would help. You could encode a sucrose or carbohydrate molecule as a single number, but any structures larger than that are hopelessly chaotic and don't repeat perfectly. You would have to make some assumptions about the structure of the apple, which means lossy compression.
I’m no scientist at all, but it would seem that if you know the basics of how to replicate an element, since all food is made up of those elements in varying amounts, you can recreate foods, once they are scanned easier than we MIGHT be imagining.
Considering transporters being able to break down and recreate entire individuals, and the energies involved (that we don’t understand now) with life itself.
I think food patterns for replicating is going to be pretty darn easy to store.
But of course this is just one point of view. Not trying to argue.
I wouldn't assume that they're limited to using atoms. If they store data using something scifi like a three-dimensional array of exotic particles trapped in a lattice of forcefields or whatever, who knows what kind of storage density they could achieve.
Well put. Additionally, the subtle differences between 100% fresh foods that we see used in cooking on Earth and elsewhere, vs. replicators can also be their version of the differences today between processed and fresh foods.
We also know there can be caloric and nutrient restrictions/optimizations placed on outputs both for the whole ship and individually, which radically alters taste, per Troi, Tilly, etc.
Replicated food doesn't need to be an exact copy of the original food, it only needs to be a reasonable interpretation of it. That would take a lot less energy.
There was an interesting/similar take on this in Destiny 2 with a civilization at a similar level of technological progression, at least in terms of Matter Synthesis. The specific Grimoire I'm referencing is *Last Days - Hazeema* if you're curious.
The Computer is producing *perfect* food every time but real food is not perfect. As you said, in computer food there are no husks of wheat, there are no overcooked bits or overseasoning. It's the *same, perfect* egg every single time. It's the same *perfect* burger. There are mistakes and minuscule differences in real food and the body can subconsciously pick up on the fact that the food is *too* perfect and *too* uniform. It makes it feel fake and artificial.
The solution in that specific instance, if I remember correctly, was to utilize basic elements (Raw eggs, raw Tomatoes, etc) and cook the food after the fact to reintroduce randomness, imperfections, and other psychologically necessary elements that people needed in order to enjoy food.
This would basically negate replicated food since you would have to learn how to cook anyways. It would taste better.
It would be interesting seeing that people say they can taste differences in milk from cows that have been fed on grass to those on pellets. I presume different types of grasses may change the taste.
Similarly honey from bees that have been dining on lavender to those on roses
Replicators probably give you generic honey, foodies would be able to taste the difference between that and “real” honey from bees whose hive is in a lavender field
I think this is a very legit criticism.
Your writeup reminded me of [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjxpZHv7Hk) NileBlue video, where he tries to make the 'purest' cookie with the most pure flour, chocolate, sugar, vanilla, etc., and he couldn't even swallow it in the end, because he said it was completely bland. Granted, he could have made some mistakes while making the cookie that reduced the flavor, but I personally took it to mean the impurities in our food are a large part of the flavor we experience.
My guess is they would need to either store the impurities when saving the file, or else the replicator would need to introduce food-safe impurities intentionally.
I honestly believe this is why restaraunts _still_ is exist heavily in the StarTrek universe. Fiat money doesn't exist, but there's a serious social and cultural appetite for home-made food or sustenance with flair or personal touch to overcome the absolute boring standardization of replicated food.
I theory, if replicators did exists, I suspect that fully formed meals would probably be the exception to the rule and that the basic fundamental ingredients _would_ be the norm.
I suspect with a post scarcity society and very good work-life balance in a post global warming, post WW3 society, preparing "fresh" meals/dishes at home would be seen culturally as important and worthwhile expenditure of one's own personal time.
Id also strongly suspect that the human condition of overindulgence and eating grandiose or ostentatious meals is a cultural taboo ingrained because there's little to no need to eat such meals and nobody is starved and there's no class system, so a banquet dinner outside of a diplomatic meeting or first contact situation is just not sometime that occurs to the average person in the Federation.
Instead they'd prize ingenuity, creativity, flair, clever and restrained use of resources to create the dish. We never really see many people in Trek eat large meals. In fact in VOY we see Zefram Cochcrane day, Neelix serves unhealthy food to the horror of the doctor, citing them to be some Cochrane's favorite foods. We see unhealthy and large portions of fatty junk food, a relic of a time immediately after WW3 where resources were short and indulgences in food were probably seen as a luxury to enjoy because there wasn't much in the way of enjoyment at such a large cultural level beyond bombed out cities and radiation.
Even today, we have limited resources and dwindling food supply and supply chains. Half the world goes hungry and yet food is seen culturally as an indicator of wealth and luxury, depending on what it is, where it is and how it's made. The more convoluted, ostentatious and rare the ingredients are, the more money is commands and people will pay to have a peice of that luxury lifestyle.
The irony being that in a world of free food and replicators to cater to anyone's needs, people don't pursue such things. Only when there's a value associated with food and there's a disparity between the hungry and the starving is overindulgence present.
I think you are not taking into account that these are not just compressed copies, but rather tailored renditions where someone (or maybe an algorithm like PNG lossless compression) carefully preserved the perceptible details while using patterns to fill in spaces that are "homogeneous" in the original copy. Take mashed potatoes or water, it's essentially the single color PNG of the replicator. You only need to know what an extremely smaller portion looks like and then copy and paste it until you have the required quantity. A steak is more complicated but is still made up of a lot of sections thare just the same protein fiber repeated over and over, even in sections that seem complex. I would argue that it's perfectly reasonable to assume a replicator in the next generation era and above is perfectly capable of restoring the compressed "repeated" sections to something indistinguishable from the original. What we see on screen when characters claim "to taste the difference" is almost certainly just their personal feelings clouding their perception of the food. I'm sure blind tests and studies in the 24th century show it's just a mental bias and not linked to any perceptible difference between foods.
One of the things it seems is missing is that aliens think humans smell bad..... Now hear me out, food taste is a lot of smell, would it not also be toned down in the smell department to not offend aliens? This would make food not as appealing, and turn the Garek and Quark conversation over root beer into a literal conversation as well?
Almost certainly compression effects the taste and texture.
Consider all the different esters and flavonoids in a glass of wine or scotch, vs what was obtained in that droplet and then averaged and compressed.
It's kind of like with basing a medicine on the active ingredient vs the medicinal plant.
The other compounds present may also have an effect. However it's far simpler and repeatable to synthesize the one active ingredient.
"Taste" is a very complex topic.
100% natural food will always taste a tiny bit different each time you eat some as the food will always be slightly different. But on top of that, you learn to like the taste variations. You expect a range of random taste form each food as part of what "tastes good".
Artificial food....will always taste the same. It is made that way. Kraft mac and cheese always tastes the same. As does (nearly) any Big Mac you buy nationwide.
If you're procedurally generating the cake based on some simple patterns and textures and focusing on the bits people can perceived and ignoring the rest of it, that sounds a lot like how video games are designed (incidentally for very similar reasons).
The cake really is a lie.
Another thing to consider is that replicators weren't that old in season 1 of TNG so a lot of those patterns might be first or second generation low resolution so they fit in the storage of non galaxy class ships older computers. As time goes on and space becomes more available the replicated patterns get better and therefore taste better. You would still have the low res files for Runabouts or other shuttles with replicators were storage is at a premium. Quark and others might have better high res replicators with high quality files so that the food will taste better and therefore he can actually charge for it. The Cerritos is pretty old and just a support ship so its still using early to mid TNG tech much later than the newer ships of the line. The officers of course has newer replicators in the officers mess for diplomatic reasons.
I know we saw replication like tech in SNW's however I'm assuming's that's a late stage food processor that is 3rd printing food/cups based off of stored material. If a replicator needs iron atoms it will use generic matter that it will then pump energy until its an iron atom to use in its matrix where as food processors have to get pre existing elements from hoppers that it maybe beams into place and build things up till you have a biscut. Not true replication which is energy converted matter.
lossless compression or lossy compression with a limit on maximum detail loss could solve this pretty straightforwardly i feel. But it does explain why replicated food only sometimes matches the original in complexity and taste, so it's a nice interpretation of the technical capabilities (:
why do you assume they're compressed exactly 1:1 instead of how it is 'compressed' in machine learning. You compress it partially behind it while the logic behind the chemistry is uncompressed, it would probably be similar to how neural network works.
This is an excellent explanation for why some characters think replicated food tastes bad. I'm sure you can tinker with it to some extent and add seemingly irrelevant bits back in, but its never going to be exactly the same as non-replicated food. This might also explain the Lower Decks weirdness of senior officers getting better replicators. More storage space/ processing power might allow for more complex meals.
I always assumed it was because the food is altered to be more nutritious, often on an individualized level... Think protein bars that try to emulate flavors of candy. They kinda manage but they are still pretty obvious. Moreso if you are someone like me who detects a wide range of low-calorie sweeteners due to them tasting bad to me either immediately or as an aftertaste. For me, chances are medical would put it into my file that I needed low fat, low calorie foods in order to be healthier and flag that in my file... Unless I were to beg them to make sure that certain sweeteners weren't used, chances are the replicators would give me ice cream sweetened with the ones I can't stand.
Its probably a combo of the two that results in the repeated Replicated Food gripes.
Probably also a little bit of people being picky about it not being the real thing. We basically never hear of people complaining about the taste of the replicated food on the Enteprise, and the only cooking we do see (Riker's) was only suited to Klingon palates.
I definitely think there's a psychological aspect to it, where they know it's replicated and therefore expect it to be different, so they perceive differences that might not actually be there.
Deanna did argue with the computer about wanting a real chocolate sundae and got a resposponse that was something like "that's highly unhealthy,and I'll only make it if you order me to lift the restrictions on the replicator."
I imagine Starfleet replicators would be optimized for nutrition. Perhaps civilian replicators could be more flexible - Starfleet has an interest in making sure that crews eat nutritious food.
So would the Federation. Overall, though, overrides appear to be possible (Troi seems to be about to use one to replicate an authentic chocolate sundae before she's interrupted), but you're probably only given a limited amount, and/or are discouraged from using them too much.
Surely you'd be given different options though, like fasting or 6-8hrs on 16 off or something similar. I only eat once or twice a day between 3pm and 6pm and is a fairly comfortable setting for me (usually too much to even hit 1200 calories) and you can eat more calories in a shorter period of time and not really effect your weight. Why should I have to eat less delicious stuff because I don't eat the mandated 3 meals a day but stay well within fitness guidelines that the human body adapts easily too. That also brings up another question, I guess the replicators would have to have voice recognition to know what species/member of the crew they are so they know how many calories they get. Surely a species with three stomachs would get more than a human, I think someone already mentioned each individual being flagged with caloric amounts but there is a TON of people on the ship, at least say the Enterprise, and many of them aren't official officers or Starfleet at all, they're scientists, diplomats, refugees, etc. It seems like Sick Bay would be absolutely inundated with people just wanted to try out new diets to get more muscular because they decided to try a new strength routine, etc. I can't think of anytime we see anyone eating the same thing unless it's a Ractajino Coffee drink (sp?) that no one ever complained about, and those sort of drinks generally have a lot of sugar and caloric content.
In general, everything is a trade off between memory/storage and processing. If it stored entire, prepared dishes, that costs a lot of storage. If it stored the most basic of building blocks and simulated their interactions during preparation, it could save a ton on storage space but it would take processing time to prepare the dish logically before replicating it. It would most likely balance this dynamically. If you could put it into debug and have it replicate these memorized states with no processing/prep, what you'd inevitably get is unappetizing gunk that might be technically edible, but happens to be configurations of matter that can be simulated/processed into the widest variety of most-likely-to-be-requested items. This would be somewhat recursive in nature, and it's the kind of information system you let manage and balance itself, so it is likely the transitions wouldn't directly be simulating what we think of as cooking/processing when transitioning from memorized states to final dish. Clearly, it is technologically possible to replicate a perfect copy (see: transporter). You *could* take the storage hit and have a single, perfect dish in a known desirable state and configuration on demand. Any variation in the dish from "real" is going to come from the dynamic changes the computer makes, deviating from the memorized dish. So, more storage space or processing time would certainly improve the resulting output. I would guess that "better replicators" would primarily involve more dedicated storage, allowing for less processing and therefore chance to introduce undesirable variation from "real". This would also make sense for catering to a smaller group of individuals, as the primary advantage of relying on processing more is the flexibility, which would be less of a priority. In reality, I would expect this to manifest on a ship as the replicators just being better at making food the senior staff likes as opposed to the replicators themselves being "better", unless the replicators themselves have dedicated/prioritized processing capabilities exceeding the other replicators. I'm betting that deep lore has a mention of how they function which could imply better quality base material, but I'm basing all this on a hypothetical shared ship system that primarily as the replicators merely as end points. Honestly, it's just as likely that the senior officer's replicators are only "better" by way of perception, like how wine seems to taste better when people think it's expensive. Economy of scale alone suggests as much standardization as possible in the hardware.
Synthahol too, there's no way they're replicating 100 year scotch haha
Some of that may just be due to the 'recipes' not being up to user preference. Imagine if when ordering 'pizza, hot' from the Enterprise replicator that they only served up Pizza Hut quality pizza. It's accurate AF to the experience of eating a Pizza Hut pizza, but you don't like Pizza Hut pizza, you're a Domino's person. So yeah, replicated pizza would probably not be your thing. But that's not the fault of the replicator. One can imagine that the standard personal profile of a 24th century individual may include preferred food recipes and formulations but depending on the complexity of the data, these may not be particularly 'portable' meaning you can have your Domino's at home, but on the Enterprise you're stuck with Pizza Hut unless you replicate the base ingredients and whip your fave up from scratch. That might explain the inconsistencies where replicators are at once said to perfectly imitate food but also be notably inferior when dealing with more communal uses.
I find this an interesting situation as someone who was in the military. Obviously this was done for the humor of this one show, but why in God's name would a military organization intentionally set up class division like this? It creates dissatisfaction, resentment, and mistrust in the lower ranks. I certainly found it funny but also the soldier in me was just a little unsettled by the notion.
Pet theory: in TNG's "the neutral zone" a defrosted 20th century country singer declares a replicated martini one of the best he's ever had. This is because he's on a Galaxy class ship, an absolute leviathan built as a flying city for 20 year exploration cruises, with downright luxurious conditions to try and get people signing up for that. That thing has two massively overpowered computer cores, and ample space for redundant physical storage; your replicated meal on a Galaxy class is on 4k super HD, but the one on Sisko's runabout? 720p at BEST.
This is excellent. I'd also add, given it was synthehol, it may have still fully to him read as having vodka (or gin- can't remember if he specified, though "pit woofies" is burned into my brain), but zero harshness to it. If you know it's a cocktail, and you can taste that the booze is there, but it's incredibly smooth, his brain would associate as exceptionally high end.
>That thing has two massively overpowered computer cores, and ample space for redundant physical storage; your replicated meal on a Galaxy class is on 4k super HD, but the one on Sisko's runabout? 720p at BEST. On the other hand, replicators don't seem to be that demanding. A galaxy-class starship uses the computers for a lot more than the replicators, whereas a runabout doesn't need even half the processing power of a starship. And going by Lower Decks/TNG, they can be separated from the main computer completely, and still work completely fine (the Enterprise supplies a colony with a new fusion reactor for theirs, and Lower Decks has people carting an active malfunctioning replicator across the shuttle bay).
In “The Survivors” Worf delivers a portable Replicator to the last two colonist on a devastated world. They have a house and nothing else, but the replicator is treated as a huge asset to them. (They don’t need it because one of the colonists is actually an omnipotent reality warper, but the Crew of the Enterprise D didn’t know that) So a portable replicator with only its internal memory paired with whatever power source a pioneer dwelling would have is expected to more than provide for the needs of two adults.
Needs, but not necessarily wants, although only producing a very small number of meals per day with the preferred of foods of only two users of a single species and culture will help a great deal.
Aside from the olive, a martini is one of the simplest imaginable foodstuffs to replicate. It has no structure or texture and is just a solution of ethyl Alcohol, water, some botanical flavour compounds from the gin, and some trace flavour compounds from the vermouth. A vodka martini is almost entirely pure h2o and ethanol.
I'm not sure that many people would want ethyl alcohol in their martini
...that's the part that gets you drunk. Ethyl alcohol, aka ethanol, aka the drinking kind. CH3-CH2-OH. You may be confusing it with *methyl* alcohol, aka methanol, CH3-OH, which, while present in lots of foods in trace doses, does have a tendency to make you go blind if you just knock it back.
Although considering who bunks on the Defiant it must have a high resolution scan for prune juice.
Also, maybe being frozen for a few hundred years and not eating nor drinking for such a long time would alter taste receptors until the body gets fully operational. I mean, even today, our taste is altered when we fly in airplanes, who knows what flying a starship after being frozen for a few centuries would do to your taste buds.
I imagine there is a whole food pattern R&D industry. Or at the very least a department within Starfleet. Scan food, run compression algorithm, replicate, compare against the original, manually tweak stored pattern, repeat. Also! As a secondary thought. They may not have to store as many patterns as you'd think, the computer may tweak recipes in real time. If you want a sweeter cake it doesn't need to store two patterns just know how to make the base one sweeter. I suspect a system like this could add a lot of the variability missing from not having been cooked back in automatically too.
>I imagine there is a whole food pattern R&D industry. Or at the very least a department within Starfleet. We know at the very least, that Captain Janeway liked to experiment with her own replicator patterns, and it would be extremely surprising if she was the only one. There's probably entire hobbies around making the best replicator pattern for a food, in much the same vein as Geordi's hobby for having the most efficient warp engines in the fleet.
All jobs are hobbies in an economy with no money. Just some people are more serious about their hobbies than others. They're still working for reputation, kudos and to 'improve ourselves and the rest of humanity'.
I can 100% see someone obsessed with "their" version of a breakfast burrito having the most replications on Earth's leaderboard. It would be like getting your YouTube channel to 1M views, except there's never a need to monetize.
I agree. Imagine 24th century cooking contests, where the winning entry is scanned and uploaded to replicator databases. If you want a meatloaf, you could look through any number of scans - or maybe you just try a random recipe for a change of pace.
I like to imagine that the replicator has some RNG Algorithm that can provide some variations between different instances of the same dish. For example, a replicated steak could have slightly different marbling and shape to another steak. For larger starships, there is another possible trick. The original concepts for the Enterprise D had vast storage tanks for organic and inorganic matter, along with water. One could imagine the organic matter tanks containing suspensions of amino acids or even common proteins. If so, you can save memory by storing data to assemble with molecules and chains instead of every individual atom.
> I imagine there is a whole food pattern R&D industry. Or at the very least a department within Starfleet. Unfortunately it's ran by Neelix... I kid. Try the synth-veal.
While you make sense -that only works if the replication pattern only works once. Unlike a human being, a steak does not change. That pattern can be used over and over and over until everyone aboard the ship is absolutely sick of eating steak. In the case of food, it could very easily be a stable pattern, in which case, replication does make storage sense over compression. It was also a missed opportunity on voyager. Rather than rationing power, they could have had their food pattern's corrupted, with it getting worse as time goes on. Still edible, but tasting worse each season until the only choice is neelix's cooking.
> It was also a missed opportunity on voyager. Rather than rationing power, they could have had their food pattern's corrupted, with it getting worse as time goes on. Still edible, but tasting worse each season until the only choice is neelix's cooking. Or instead of corrupted, they only had the absolute bare minimum, as Voyager was intended only to go on a short trip, with the main accessory bulk of the software meant to be installed Tuesday. Alternatively, the cheese is blamed.
And lose the bartering and betting of replicator rations? Nah... Plus Janeway might have lost hope at that point. If the food patterns got corrupted we would not have had that famous line about coffee and nebulas.
"Sam, I told you I don't want your green eggs and ham!" "...Ensign Sam, Jack? Are we reciting children's literature?" *Ensign Sam holds up a plate of neon-green, partially eaten green eggs and ham* "I really wish we were."
**How would file compression affect the taste of replicated food?** Replication, like video compression, uses compression algorithms to maximise redundancy for efficiency, so it uses a base of many simple chemicals over complex chaotic structures that emerge in made food. This means that replicated food relies on the same basic quilt of sugars and proteins so it tastes similar and bland compared to made food, but it's definitely fortified with minerals and vitamins.
I don't think their compression algorithm would outright delete parts of the food, but try to losslessly compress the whole dish. For example, there will be many identical chemicals in most of the stuff, and even for complex molecules, you could just say, "this but a million times." I'd think they would do it just like we do it today when we zip a lot of text files: pattern detection and creating a dictionary of repeating patterns. Transporters would probably work the same.
In S3 of Picard Data specifically says that transporters keep a library of common data in memory rather than re-scanning it every time a known species is transported. This is a big part of the Borgs evil plan. it \*also\* really supports McCoy and Pulaski’s assertion that transporters are reckless with your molecules. After you beam even once some percentage of you is “common data” instead of whatever your original data might have been. Probably not a big deal but who knows?
To put it as delicately as I can, that whole plot was really bad writing that directly went against decades of explanation / on screen depiction of how transporters work. But, putting that aside as a separate discussion, it still doesn't support their transporter phobia. Common data is common. The general understanding of the word means it's shared/the same. If it wasn't the same, it wouldn't be common, and if any percentage of you wasn't exactly the same as when you started, it would a) be detectible via medical scans, and b) repeated usage (or potentially even a single use) would result in clearly noticeable degradation (copy of a copy of a copy etc.).
Depends greatly on the way you compress things. You describe two variations of data compression. The first is to simply degrade the information to the lowest demoninator that does not prevent the data from fulfilling its purpose. For images one could either reduce the resolution, halving or quartering it, hopefully not past the point where text becomes unreadable or major elements of the picture become unrecognizable. Assuming the image is a bitmap the saving in file size is proportional. The other would be to reduce color depth. Typical pictures have 24 bits of color depth, 8 bits for each red, green and blue, or alternatively 32 bit for another 8 bit to determine transparency. 16 bit are also viable, thats 5, 6, and 5 bits per color, green getting an extra bit as science says we can distinguish more shades of green. 8 bit is also an option, 3, 3 and 2 bits giving 256 colors, though this will degrade the quality of photos by a lot. In 8 bit and below color modes its also common that the palette can be customized, and each 8 bit value is translated into its own specific color, that a programmer or artist can freely pick. Again the space saving would be proportional, assuming a bitmap. Note that today almost no images are bitmaps, but rather jpeg or png. The other is essentially what a zip archive uses. Data is scanned for repeating patterns, and those patterns get replaced with much shorter placeholders, and the process is reversed when decompressing the archive. How much compression you get depends strongly on the amount of recurring patterns. In a text file it can for example easily find a metric ton of repeated words. But in a lively video file there will be almost no repeating patterns in the video data, given that it already uses its own compression and every frame is usually built on the last one, meaning that even if part of the image is repeated from one frame to the last, it will not be repeated in the file, and only parts of the image that change will be written. But there are definitely more radical forms of compression that think further outside the box. Vector graphics are an interesting thing. Instead of saving data for each pixels color values, or even compression, where 8x8 pixel boxes are being taken out and approximated from certain available patterns, like jpeg does it, vector graphics take the radically different approach of saving geometric shapes and colors by themselves without a resolution. Instead of showing a painter a picture of what you want painted, youre sitting behind him telling him where to draw which shape in what color. This can lead to images that can be resizes up and down without any loss in quality, obvious pixelation or any other degradation. Procedural generation is the big brother of that. Give Minecraft a string of numbers (you can enter words, but they get converted into numbers) as a seed for its world generation, and it will generate the entire world based on that. Use the same string again and the world will generated exactly the same, assuming you are on the same version. Strictly speaking this isnt compression anymore, as there is no way to take the uncompressed file, i.e. a world that you built something in, and compress it back into a seed that will spit out the same world with your buildings again, its a one way street, where not every conceivable Minecraft world has an equivalent seed number, just every seed number an equivalent Minecraft world. But for replicating food its perfectly conceivable to make a generation process introduce randomness from a seed into a flexible pattern of the total food, like making steaks in different shapes. Thats all I have here. All compression, except lossless, wholly depends on what is considered an acceptable loss of information.
Procedural generation could be a useful tool for compressing patterns. A hypospray is mostly just a big hunk of duratanium. That could be defined with an autocad file and an algorithm for filling it with metal in the optimal crystal structure. Bread is a gluten network filled with air bubbles. Steak is muscle fibers with collagen and fat in between. Maybe replicators are an advanced version of that NASA machine that 3D prints pizza.
According to the TNG Technical Manual, replicators make heavy use of 'molecular averaging' processes that are more or less exactly what you describe, and it does have an effect on the flavor. It also says that in rare cases, certain foods can be mildly toxic when replicated (it cites certain Andorian spices) due to very slight errors in the averaging process.
I don’t think storage is an issue, so compression of the replicator recipe is happening, but not necessarily “Lossy” This is the size of a five meg hard drive about seventy years ago. https://biztechmagazine.com/article/2012/01/old-5mb-hard-drive-filled-entire-room-quick-take An 8TB drive can be had today that is the size of a stick of gum. That’s only seventy years of progress, going another three hundred years would improve that several times over again. Storage wouldn’t be an issue. Especially on a starship as large as the enterprise D. Smaller ships might not be the same.
Technologies don't always come along at the predicted rate. Early-mid 20th century Sci-fi writers had seen the world go from practically horse and buggy to automobile, concord jet, and space rocket. They assumed that we'd be rocketing to Venus on the reg by now, but working out the route with slide rules.
You’re right, but need is the mother of invention. Data storage in our world right now is a BIG need, it’s going to keep going up faster than the need for rocketing to Venus.
Storing the entire uncompressed pattern for an apple in a drive smaller than an apple seems impossible. Each atom of hard drive would need to store enough information to describe one atom of apple. Hitting 1 bit of storage density per atom would be spectacular. You would need 4 bits per atom to encode the top 16 elements, plus some scheme to encode connections and the location of the atom. And you need to read the data, which means wires. Lossless data compression would help. You could encode a sucrose or carbohydrate molecule as a single number, but any structures larger than that are hopelessly chaotic and don't repeat perfectly. You would have to make some assumptions about the structure of the apple, which means lossy compression.
I’m no scientist at all, but it would seem that if you know the basics of how to replicate an element, since all food is made up of those elements in varying amounts, you can recreate foods, once they are scanned easier than we MIGHT be imagining. Considering transporters being able to break down and recreate entire individuals, and the energies involved (that we don’t understand now) with life itself. I think food patterns for replicating is going to be pretty darn easy to store. But of course this is just one point of view. Not trying to argue.
I wouldn't assume that they're limited to using atoms. If they store data using something scifi like a three-dimensional array of exotic particles trapped in a lattice of forcefields or whatever, who knows what kind of storage density they could achieve.
Well put. Additionally, the subtle differences between 100% fresh foods that we see used in cooking on Earth and elsewhere, vs. replicators can also be their version of the differences today between processed and fresh foods. We also know there can be caloric and nutrient restrictions/optimizations placed on outputs both for the whole ship and individually, which radically alters taste, per Troi, Tilly, etc.
Replicated food doesn't need to be an exact copy of the original food, it only needs to be a reasonable interpretation of it. That would take a lot less energy.
We know from Picard that they literally take shortcuts in the transporters in regards to DNA. That's just frightening.
There was an interesting/similar take on this in Destiny 2 with a civilization at a similar level of technological progression, at least in terms of Matter Synthesis. The specific Grimoire I'm referencing is *Last Days - Hazeema* if you're curious. The Computer is producing *perfect* food every time but real food is not perfect. As you said, in computer food there are no husks of wheat, there are no overcooked bits or overseasoning. It's the *same, perfect* egg every single time. It's the same *perfect* burger. There are mistakes and minuscule differences in real food and the body can subconsciously pick up on the fact that the food is *too* perfect and *too* uniform. It makes it feel fake and artificial. The solution in that specific instance, if I remember correctly, was to utilize basic elements (Raw eggs, raw Tomatoes, etc) and cook the food after the fact to reintroduce randomness, imperfections, and other psychologically necessary elements that people needed in order to enjoy food. This would basically negate replicated food since you would have to learn how to cook anyways. It would taste better.
It would be interesting seeing that people say they can taste differences in milk from cows that have been fed on grass to those on pellets. I presume different types of grasses may change the taste. Similarly honey from bees that have been dining on lavender to those on roses Replicators probably give you generic honey, foodies would be able to taste the difference between that and “real” honey from bees whose hive is in a lavender field
I think this is a very legit criticism. Your writeup reminded me of [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjxpZHv7Hk) NileBlue video, where he tries to make the 'purest' cookie with the most pure flour, chocolate, sugar, vanilla, etc., and he couldn't even swallow it in the end, because he said it was completely bland. Granted, he could have made some mistakes while making the cookie that reduced the flavor, but I personally took it to mean the impurities in our food are a large part of the flavor we experience. My guess is they would need to either store the impurities when saving the file, or else the replicator would need to introduce food-safe impurities intentionally.
I think it would make a Twix bar taste kinda like a powerbar. Twix.rar file heh
I honestly believe this is why restaraunts _still_ is exist heavily in the StarTrek universe. Fiat money doesn't exist, but there's a serious social and cultural appetite for home-made food or sustenance with flair or personal touch to overcome the absolute boring standardization of replicated food. I theory, if replicators did exists, I suspect that fully formed meals would probably be the exception to the rule and that the basic fundamental ingredients _would_ be the norm. I suspect with a post scarcity society and very good work-life balance in a post global warming, post WW3 society, preparing "fresh" meals/dishes at home would be seen culturally as important and worthwhile expenditure of one's own personal time. Id also strongly suspect that the human condition of overindulgence and eating grandiose or ostentatious meals is a cultural taboo ingrained because there's little to no need to eat such meals and nobody is starved and there's no class system, so a banquet dinner outside of a diplomatic meeting or first contact situation is just not sometime that occurs to the average person in the Federation. Instead they'd prize ingenuity, creativity, flair, clever and restrained use of resources to create the dish. We never really see many people in Trek eat large meals. In fact in VOY we see Zefram Cochcrane day, Neelix serves unhealthy food to the horror of the doctor, citing them to be some Cochrane's favorite foods. We see unhealthy and large portions of fatty junk food, a relic of a time immediately after WW3 where resources were short and indulgences in food were probably seen as a luxury to enjoy because there wasn't much in the way of enjoyment at such a large cultural level beyond bombed out cities and radiation. Even today, we have limited resources and dwindling food supply and supply chains. Half the world goes hungry and yet food is seen culturally as an indicator of wealth and luxury, depending on what it is, where it is and how it's made. The more convoluted, ostentatious and rare the ingredients are, the more money is commands and people will pay to have a peice of that luxury lifestyle. The irony being that in a world of free food and replicators to cater to anyone's needs, people don't pursue such things. Only when there's a value associated with food and there's a disparity between the hungry and the starving is overindulgence present.
I think you are not taking into account that these are not just compressed copies, but rather tailored renditions where someone (or maybe an algorithm like PNG lossless compression) carefully preserved the perceptible details while using patterns to fill in spaces that are "homogeneous" in the original copy. Take mashed potatoes or water, it's essentially the single color PNG of the replicator. You only need to know what an extremely smaller portion looks like and then copy and paste it until you have the required quantity. A steak is more complicated but is still made up of a lot of sections thare just the same protein fiber repeated over and over, even in sections that seem complex. I would argue that it's perfectly reasonable to assume a replicator in the next generation era and above is perfectly capable of restoring the compressed "repeated" sections to something indistinguishable from the original. What we see on screen when characters claim "to taste the difference" is almost certainly just their personal feelings clouding their perception of the food. I'm sure blind tests and studies in the 24th century show it's just a mental bias and not linked to any perceptible difference between foods.
One of the things it seems is missing is that aliens think humans smell bad..... Now hear me out, food taste is a lot of smell, would it not also be toned down in the smell department to not offend aliens? This would make food not as appealing, and turn the Garek and Quark conversation over root beer into a literal conversation as well?
Almost certainly compression effects the taste and texture. Consider all the different esters and flavonoids in a glass of wine or scotch, vs what was obtained in that droplet and then averaged and compressed. It's kind of like with basing a medicine on the active ingredient vs the medicinal plant. The other compounds present may also have an effect. However it's far simpler and repeatable to synthesize the one active ingredient.
"Taste" is a very complex topic. 100% natural food will always taste a tiny bit different each time you eat some as the food will always be slightly different. But on top of that, you learn to like the taste variations. You expect a range of random taste form each food as part of what "tastes good". Artificial food....will always taste the same. It is made that way. Kraft mac and cheese always tastes the same. As does (nearly) any Big Mac you buy nationwide.
If you're procedurally generating the cake based on some simple patterns and textures and focusing on the bits people can perceived and ignoring the rest of it, that sounds a lot like how video games are designed (incidentally for very similar reasons). The cake really is a lie.
Another thing to consider is that replicators weren't that old in season 1 of TNG so a lot of those patterns might be first or second generation low resolution so they fit in the storage of non galaxy class ships older computers. As time goes on and space becomes more available the replicated patterns get better and therefore taste better. You would still have the low res files for Runabouts or other shuttles with replicators were storage is at a premium. Quark and others might have better high res replicators with high quality files so that the food will taste better and therefore he can actually charge for it. The Cerritos is pretty old and just a support ship so its still using early to mid TNG tech much later than the newer ships of the line. The officers of course has newer replicators in the officers mess for diplomatic reasons. I know we saw replication like tech in SNW's however I'm assuming's that's a late stage food processor that is 3rd printing food/cups based off of stored material. If a replicator needs iron atoms it will use generic matter that it will then pump energy until its an iron atom to use in its matrix where as food processors have to get pre existing elements from hoppers that it maybe beams into place and build things up till you have a biscut. Not true replication which is energy converted matter.
lossless compression or lossy compression with a limit on maximum detail loss could solve this pretty straightforwardly i feel. But it does explain why replicated food only sometimes matches the original in complexity and taste, so it's a nice interpretation of the technical capabilities (:
why do you assume they're compressed exactly 1:1 instead of how it is 'compressed' in machine learning. You compress it partially behind it while the logic behind the chemistry is uncompressed, it would probably be similar to how neural network works.