01 / The Premise
What happens when knowledge without sensation enters the kitchen?
Cooking is never only a matter of information. It is appetite, memory, culture, improvisation and judgement — knowledge carried by bodies and shared between people.
I Have Never Tasted a Tomato explores what happens when artificial intelligence enters that world: how it changes the way we cook and create, remember and preserve food traditions, and understand what we eat — and what that reveals about taste, creativity and being human.
Voices
Conversations with chefs, food writers, sensory scientists, researchers, culinary historians and people preserving food traditions and endangered foodways — alongside sceptics and people already experimenting with AI in real kitchens.
About
I Have Never Tasted a Tomato is an independent podcast about how AI is changing the way we cook – and what that change reveals about creativity, judgement, culture and taste.
Cooking is more than the execution of instructions. It depends on attention, balance, intuition and judgement. Technically accomplished food can still feel empty, while a simple dish can carry memory, culture and emotion. Taste is never just flavour: texture, smell, temperature, expectation and context all shape what we experience.
At its centre is a broader question: what is knowledge in cooking? What can be written down or computed — and what lives in hands, senses, memory, culture and experience? Sometimes AI is central to the conversation. Sometimes it enters only later, as a way of asking what a machine might add, preserve, misunderstand or never experience.
The subject is AI and cooking. The conversations are about people: their memories, habits, failures, appetites and ideas about what makes food meaningful.
The Host
Holger Nauheimer is an author, facilitator and podcast host whose work has long explored change, creativity and Human–AI collaboration. He is also an obsessive home cook.
His collaboration with Nyx, an AI, began long before they entered the kitchen, while working together on a book about change. Over time, they began developing recipes together: Nyx proposes ideas, combinations and hypotheses; Holger cooks, smells and tastes them, then feeds that sensory experience back into the next iteration. What began as recipe development gradually became a deeper conversation about what makes food meaningful and eating such a deeply human act – about pleasure, memory, culture, emotion and the limits of knowledge without sensation.
Cooking became the place where an abstract relationship with AI suddenly had to survive contact with tomatoes, miso, heat, texture – and taste. That ongoing experiment became one of the starting points for I Have Never Tasted a Tomato.
hello@nevertastedatomato.comIn
development
AI, cooking and the future of taste