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Chef Matan Zaken brings artificial intelligence into his creative process — but the final judgement still happens in the kitchen.
Matan Zaken
Chef · NHOMe, Paris
Can AI help create a dish worth serving in a fine-dining restaurant?
Listen to the trailer
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Be among the first to hear our conversations. New episodes starting November 5.
01 / The Premise
What happens when knowledge without sensation enters the kitchen?
Artificial intelligence knows an extraordinary amount about food. It can analyse millions of recipes, suggest unexpected flavour combinations and explain culinary traditions from around the world. But it has never tasted a tomato. It has never smelled bread coming out of the oven, burned its fingers on a hot pan or remembered a childhood meal. And yet, we are beginning to invite AI into one of the most creative, sensory and deeply human activities of our lives: cooking.
I Have Never Tasted a Tomato is a podcast about what happens next. We explore creativity, curiosity, tradition, experimentation and the sometimes surprising things that happen when human beings begin to cook with artificial intelligence. We ask how AI might change the way we develop recipes, discover flavours, share culinary knowledge and think about our own creativity.
Because food is never just about ingredients or recipes. It carries memories, emotions, traditions and the ways we connect with one another.
How is AI changing the way we cook? And what might our experiences of taste, memory and emotion teach us about AI — and ourselves?
02 / Meet our first guests
Meet our first guests
Three people. Three perspectives. One question: What happens when artificial intelligence enters the kitchen?
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Professor Ganesh Bagler explores the hidden patterns of recipes, ingredients and flavours — and what happens when we turn cooking into data.
Professor Ganesh Bagler
Professor · Computational Gastronomy, India
Can a machine think like a chef?
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For Lerato Thelejane, food opens a conversation about childhood, cultural identity and the knowledge we carry from one generation to the next.
Lerato Thelejane
Culture and transformation leader · South Africa
Can AI understand a food memory it has never lived?
Guests
Our conversations begin with the people behind the ideas: their memories, their favourite dishes, their failures, their discoveries — and the experiences that have shaped their relationship with food.
We meet chefs, scientists, food writers, creative thinkers and sometimes people who have never used AI in their kitchens. Some embrace its possibilities. Others are sceptical.
What brings them together is not a shared view of artificial intelligence, but a curiosity about food and what it means to be human.
The Host
Holger Nauheimer has spent much of his professional life exploring how people think, create, learn and navigate change. He is also a passionate home cook, fascinated by the stories, memories and emotions that surround food.
When he began experimenting with recipes alongside Nyx, his AI collaborator, he discovered something intriguing: a machine that knows an extraordinary amount about cooking, but has never experienced a single flavour. What began as a culinary experiment soon raised much bigger questions.
In I Have Never Tasted a Tomato, Holger takes these questions into conversations with chefs, researchers, food writers and other curious minds. Nyx occasionally joins the conversation, bringing a different perspective — but the stories, experiences and memories belong to the people.
hello@nevertastedatomato.comThe first conversations arrive November 5
2026