Do Androids Dream of Electric Soup? - On AI and the philosophy of Lentils

We use AI for our emails, grammar, strategy, profile pics, search engines - but what does soup designed by AI taste like, and is it even morally acceptable to eat it?

The Most Philosophical Soup

"The Greeks, And their dry lentil soup, delight me more than all that painful luxury of excess."

Timon the Pyrrhonian

Humble Lentils make the most philosophical soup. Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, was once a student of Crates the Cynic,¹ a man who believed in ἀναίδεια (anaídeia), a type of radical shamelessness ²taken as a path to philosophical freedom.

Where Zeno was austere but reserved, Crates embodied the full-blooded Cynic ideal: utterly indifferent to public opinion. To mock conventions. To live truthfully, no matter how undignified. The Cynics were called κυνικός (cynicos), meaning Dog-like. There are competing etymological theories, but most probably, it first gained traction as an insult, but they owned it. They rejected the conventional classical desires for wealth, power, glory, and conformity.³

Like dogs, Cynics lived in the open and had no sense of shame.

Crates was a demanding teacher, and Zeno found the lessons challenging. Hoping to dislodge Zeno's lingering modesty and sense of shame, Crates handed him a large, awkward pot of lentil soup. His task was to carry it openly through the busy streets of the Κεραμεικός (Ceramicus), Ancient Athens' pottery district.

Zeno was gripped by embarrassment and tried to conceal the pot under his clothes. Seeing this, Crates smashed it with his staff. Lentil Soup splattered down Zeno's robes and onto the dusty street. Overcome with shame, Zeno fled. Crates, undeterred, called after him:

"Why run away, my little Phoenician? Nothing terrible has befallen you."

Crates, from Diogenes Laërtius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers

Crate's Lesson

"Do not prefer a dainty dish to lentils, And so cause factious quarrels in our party."⁴

Crates

What's going on here needs a bit of context to understand. Lentil soup was a humble, messy dish associated with poverty. It's what the poorest of the poor ate. A modern equivalent of Crate's lesson might be asking someone to dumpster dive for food that a supermarket had thrown out. They are ashamed to be seen "bin-hoking"⁵, so you empty the whole bin of garbage over them, and they run away ashamed.

Now think - why were they ashamed to be seen dumpster-diving? Food waste is a huge problem, as are rising food costs. Dumpster diving is perfectly logical, virtuous and environmentally friendly. Only convention, or the fear of what others think, makes it 'shameful'. Dumpster diving might leave a stain on your clothes, but it leaves no stain on your character.

While Crates was a Cynic, and Zeno found Cynicism a little extreme, the exercise still teaches a key Stoic concept. Crates sought to purge Zeno of his ego through humiliation to show him that shame is a prison built in the mind. For Stoics, the lesson endured: to become free, one must let go of the ego ⁶ and stop fearing the crowd's judgment.

Eat the damned lentils.

A Quest for Healthier Soup

"It is a Stoic doctrine, that the wise man will do everything well, and will be able to cook even lentils cleverly."⁷

Athanaeus

My wife and I are both late-diagnosed diabetics (post-COVID diabetes,⁸ yes, it's a thing), which means we are aiming to keep carbs low in an attempt to control or even reverse it. We are also, like most people, watching the weekly food bill.⁹ Frankly, I still need to shift some lockdown pounds as well.

Soup is a decent go-to lunch. We had different tins of soup, but then we actually started looking at the labels, and the carbs, salt, and sugar, even in vegetable soups, were more than reasonable; humble lentil soup seemed to be about the best.

Plastic Food in Plastic Packaging

I was cooking lunch one day and wanted to see if I could do better. Even the 'best' tinned soup on some levels will probably be worse than its homemade equivalent. Isn't it?

The tabloids love nothing more than a good food scare story or one on miracle foods. One week, blueberries are the best superfood¹⁰ for your health; the next week, they give you Hepatitis A.¹¹

But a few stories went past on my doom scroll often enough to sink in -

First, hearing of research, which may have been a miscalculation or not, that recycled black plastic spatulas¹² are tainted with fire-retardant chemicals, caused me to buy some silicone spatulas. Unfortunately, I had a spinal-tap moment, and these turned out to be about half the size I was expecting.

Then, I read that overheated Teflon gives off gases and causes Teflon Flu,¹³ so I bought a new frying pan with more steel than non-stick. Finally, and most pertinent here, there have been more than a few stories lately about UPFs (Ultra-Processed-Foods)¹⁴ and BPAs - (bisphenol A plastic).¹⁵ These aren't new stories, but as you get older - and with the rise in obesity,¹⁶ cancer,¹⁷ long-covid¹⁸ and the general malaise of modern living in an era of collapse, there's an incentive to start paying more attention.

"Edible food-like substances."

"CHOW contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly, the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. MEALS was CHOW with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition."

Terry Pratchett - Good Omens

The above synthetic food is the tool of one of the horsemen of the apocalypse in Good Omens. It is a brilliant book co-authored by Terry Pratchett and wonderfully brought to the screen by David Tennant and Michael Sheen. I've often thought that if I needed to give a crash course to an alien, Pratchett's Discworld series would be a better overview of human society than many sociology and history textbooks, wyethen I first read the above, it hadn't quite sunk in that MEALS is, for all intents and purposes, real.

I've recently started listening to the audiobook "Ultra Processed People".¹⁹ Ultra-processed foods don't have one specific definition, but they are the things in food that have gone through heavily industrialised processes. You see them on your ready-meal ingredients list but not on your shelf in your kitchen. The Pseudo-foods. Described by one scientist as 'Edible food-like substances'

"Ultra-processed foods are basically confections of group 2 ingredients [substances extracted from whole foods], typically combined with sophisticated use of additives, to make them edible, palatable, and habit-forming. They have no real resemblance to group 1 foods [minimally processed foods], although they may be shaped, labelled and marketed so as to seem wholesome and 'fresh'"²⁰

Carlos Monteiro

Ultra-processed foods now make up the majority of calories consumed in the West.

They are your Hydrogenated oils, modified starches, firming agents, petrol derivatives, powdered preservatives and coloured E-numbers. Things that have been creeping into food since at least the 80s that are there only for the benefit of the profit of the food manufacturers rather than any nutritional or health benefit. They are cheaper than real food; they are designed to be 'hyper-palatable'.

Hyper-Palatable Food (HPF) combines high levels of fats, carbs, sugar and salt to trigger your brain's reward system, taste and the brain to be addictive, encourage excessive eating, and it's linked to all sorts of health problems.

Ultra-processed foods have been linked to, among other things, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. Research published in The BMJ²¹ found that higher intake of UPFs is associated with a greater risk of developing chronic conditions, even after adjusting for calorie intake and nutrient profile.

They are almost impossible to avoid and certainly harm you. There seems little point in trying to reduce carbs to reverse Diabetes when the preservatives and colours in your soup could be contributing to causing it in the first place.

The Tins of The Terror

The doomed Franklin expedition²² in 1845 saw two ships - the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror- try to find the Northwest Passage. The ships froze, trapped in the ice for over a year, before being abandoned. All the crew died, and not all quickly. Investigations have found evidence of many maladies, from lead poisoning to scurvy, compounded by cannibalism.

The lead poisoning came from sloppy soldering.²³ The ships had three years of food, including tinned soup and vegetables. So far, so healthy. Except that the canned provisions had been ordered and created in a hurry. Sloppy soldering reportedly saw rivulets of lead run down the inside of the tins like candle wax, some soups were heated in the tins, lead absorbed into the food, and potentially broken solder saw much food spoiled.

Most tinned food has progressed beyond the risk of lead poisoning,²⁴ but we've replaced it with a modern alternative. Many tins are now lined with plastic - specifically, bisphenol A (BPA).²⁵

"Charles Drabkin thought that Progresso soup was a healthy option for lunch, but then he found out that chemicals in the can lining have been linked to obesity, Diabetes, heart disease and cancer.Progresso lines its soup cans with bisphenol A, or BPA. Scientists have long warned of BPA's link to cancer, but a new study has found that it's related to obesity and Diabetes as well. According to the study, BPA basically tricks your fat cells into taking in more fat — and can also trick your pancreas into producing more insulin than necessary, which can lead to Type 2 Diabetes."

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bpa-in-soup-cans/

Much like with the ultra-processed pseudo-foods, if you are trying to eat healthy to reverse Type-2 Diabetes, it isn't much bloody use when Diabetes and obesity-linked plastic molecules are leaching into your lunch.

I wanted something better. I could have looked at a myriad of soup recipes online. There are some 'ancient' recipes, some even claiming to be Zeno's soup ...but I also didn't want a different soup. We enjoyed the soup. We just wanted it without the plastic and the pseudo-foods.

What I wanted was to have my soup and eat it.

But I also know my limits. My ad-hoc experiments in food development are best described as a bit "Heston Bloody-awful". In particular, I remember one attempt at making homemade air-dried battered haggis Pakora using an out-of-date pancake mix that had people checking on my wife to ensure she was OK after seeing the pictures.

The Electric Soup-made AI test

Here's where the electric soup comes in. I took photos of the tin front, back, ingredients, and nutrition label and uploaded them into ChatGPT with this prompt:

"You are a nutritionist, dietician and health specialist British celebrity chef. I would like you to make me a recipe that reproduces the flavour of this soup, but cheaply made at home, without ultra-processed ingredients, it must be at least as nutritious and ideally have lower carbs and sugar."

We could tweak that prompt a little more now, but that's all it needed. Out came a recipe built from whole ingredients – red lentils, carrots, onions, garlic, tomato purée, herbs, stock, and some tips for further lowering the carbs, like swapping in sweet potato.

The AI had reverse-engineered the soup, but had it improved it?

Scaling Up, Slowing Down

I wanted to bulk cook meal prep and freeze meals in advance, which would be cheaper per portion and one less thing to think about each day. So, I asked it to scale the initial recipe it had given me by ten. I tweaked the recipe slightly (I'll cover that later), but not by much.

How soup is made

Ingredients (for around 28 portions)

• 1500g dried red lentils

• 10 large carrots, diced

• 5 Sweet Potatoes

• 10 medium onions, chopped

• 20 tbsp tomato purée

• 20 cloves garlic, minced

• 10 tsp ground white pepper

• 10 tsp dried oregano

• 10 tsp smoked paprika (optional)

• 5 tbsp olive oil (for sautéing)

• 12 litres of vegetable stock (low-salt, homemade or bouillon powder without additives)

• Optional: a pinch of chilli flakes for added heat

Method:

1. Prepare the lentils: Rinse the red lentils thoroughly in cold water and set aside.

2. Sauté the vegetables: In a large pot, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add chopped onion, garlic and diced carrots. Sauté 5-7 minutes until softened and fragrant.

3. Add tomato purée and spices: Stir in the tomato purée, white pepper, oregano, parsley, and paprika (if using). Cook for another 2-3 minutes to release the flavours.

4. Add the lentils and stock: Add the red lentils and diced potatoes to the pot. Pour in the vegetable stock, stirring to combine all ingredients. Bring the mixture to a boil.

5. Simmer: Once boiling, reduce the heat to low and let the soup simmer uncovered for about 25-30 minutes, or until the lentils and vegetables are tender.

6. Season and blend (optional): Taste soup and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper. For a smoother texture, you can blend half of the soup with an immersion blender or leave it chunky for more texture.

7. Serve hot with a sprinkle of fresh parsley or a drizzle of olive oil on top.

*We'll get to the macros in a bit

The first time I made this, I froze it in individual portions, which worked OK.

Now, I have three big Tupperware trays and seven individual soup tubs.

That gives me 28 portions. I keep three big trays in the freezer with seven portions in each and seven in the fridge. Once a week, I defrost a tray and decant it into the individual servings, and that's that week's soup in the refrigerator.

By the way - this is a lot of soup. Have many pots.

So, which soup is the healthiest?

So, how do the two soups compare in cost, convenience and nutrition?

Price - As of today, a 400g tin of Red Lentil Soup from Asda is 75p, not counting delivery charges.

Here's my estimate on the cost of the homemade soup.

Nutrition

Macronutrients, and a word of warning here: I am not a nutritionist, and I'm going by what's on labels, which I'm reliably informed can be a bit hit and miss or should be taken with a pinch of salt. I'm taking the nutritional information off the label for the Canned Soup. I'm programming into MyFitnessPal for the AI-made soup, but I'm getting as close as possible to the nutritional info on the labels or one available.

Also, note I tweaked the initial AI recipe based on looking at the nutrients, so it wasn't 100% immediately perfect for what I wanted. For example, in the initial recipe, one tablespoon of olive oil was used, and when I scaled it up, it went up to 10! But I've found five is fine in practice and saves on the fat.

And I don’t want you to think I’ve over-thought the soup. There’s always flexibility in cooking. The original recipes called for fresh parsley. But our groceries come on a Tuesday, and I cook on the weekend, and I know I could find better ways to store it, but the parsley would look a bit manky, and we don't really like it. Also, the recipe calls for 10 onions, but Onions come in packs of three, so I use nine. I use larger onions, so it balances out. (And yet people say I can be inflexible!!)

I did run into a lentil minefield …or perhaps it was a mental lentil field.

You would think it would be a simple task to find out roughly how many carbs there are in some red lentils. These measures are all estimates and, to a surprising extent, will vary depending on what specific brand of ingredients you use - the lentils in particular. Lentil labelling is, frankly, diabolical. I found various dried red lentils that list their % carbs as 11.7g per 100g to 15g per 100g up to 63g per 100g. After a bit of investigation, it became clear that some lentil packets must list their nutrient values for when they are cooked, and some for the dried lentils. Even so, there still seems to be wide variations in carbs and sugar - I don't know how one type of red lentil has eight times the sugar of another. If there's a difference, or if they use different methodologies or margins.

The carbs in lentils are starchy, but the fibre in lentils impacts absorbtion. Is that washing away starchy carbs if I soak the lentils and rinse them? Do some of them take that into account?

Who knows. I don't.

I spoke to Nutritionist Michael Walne, who said -

"How long is a piece of string… the body doesn't do what scientists do. Even the highest sugar content lentils are still low in sugar… and given the fibre type and content they're a healthy option. You can alter the impact and area under the curve of the carbs by adding more protein. That helps improve the health profile too."

Also, things will depend on the size of carrots, sweet potatoes &c. &c. &c.

Theoretically, here's what the AI gave us:

• A month of lunches for one person (28 portions)

• Around £5:60 cheaper than the equivalent tins*

• Lower carb, lower sugar**

• Fewer ultra-processed ingredients***

• Fewer micro-plastics and poisons****

* If you don't charge for cooking time, energy, or freezer energy to store it.

** Probably, if you use the right lentils, depending on the size of your sweet potatoes, we'll get into the macro-nutrients a bit.

*** I say fewer rather than none; I've not checked the Lazy Garlic or the Tomato Puree I used.

**** I hope so. Knowing my luck, the tomato puree comes in lead-sealed asbestos tubes.

It's almost like they are deliberately making it complicated when you just want to eat food that won't make you sick and doesn't have plastic in it.

Depending on my estimates on veg weight, type of lentils, and how accurate the weights and measures are - the homemade soup may have slightly better or worse macro-nutrients and may cost slightly less or slightly more.

So, is it worth it? I spoke to Chris Vance, who ran Shield Krav-Maga Self Defence and Fitness and introduced me to macronutrient tracking. I asked him if the homemade was healthier when, by some estimates, it had higher carbs and fat.

"Define 'healthier'? The trade off of a few carbs for better nutrients and less preservatives is surely worth it."

So, in terms of health, I'm going to say yes. The experiment was a success, and I will see if I can use it to replace other over-packaged and ultra-processed plastic foods.

The Ethics of Lentil Soup

"I'm not bad - I'm just drawn that way."

- Jessica Rabbit

Zeno's lentil soup conundrum was not to be ashamed of eating poor and humble food. However, the soup made by AI raises different ethical questions. Should we be ashamed to be eating it?

There's no doubt AI is problematic - it steals people's work to train on without paying them, there's high water usage ( though keeping perspective, your AI use probably wastes far less water than your meat-eating). There is AI use in manipulative deep-fakes and scams, hurting education, profiteering, killing the em–dash, making fatal mistakes when driving cars or rejecting medical claims, dead internet theory and job destruction… But it's a genie that can't be put back in the bottle.

It's a tool. A hammer that can be used to smash in a head or build a hospital.

In "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", Shoshana Zuboff recalls that there was once an alternative model envisioned for the smart home, one that didn't involve a massive breach of privacy of a corporation always listening in and tracking you to sell your data. A private decentralised model could work - it just wouldn't be as profitable.

The same is true with Large Language Models. They can, actually, be run reasonably well on local machines without using enormous environmental resources and without invading your privacy.

"Prompting a local model on a laptop requires no water and uses less than 10% of the energy of prompting a model in a data center."

They probably can't currently be used without relying on stolen intellectual property - but, and I think this is critical to appreciate, that's not an inherent flaw in the technology; that's a moral choice to steal made by the creators.

We can imagine AI technology with broadly the same features and benefits but made morally - trained using data that paid the artists and owners who made it, run on systems with less environmental impact. There's no reason AIs that 'steal jobs' shouldn't pay income tax on the 'value' they add as the means of production. Of course, this isn't going to happen under Capitalism, but just like people have tried to make more ethical smartphones, maybe we will soon see more ethical AI models.

You can't spell Eudaimonia without AI.

Εὐδαιμονία ( Eudaimonia lit.' Good Spirit') is the condition of human flourishing, or living well. Since Aristotle, it has been the goal of virtue-based philosophies. The modern malaise is the difficulty of drowning in data and deciding well. As Dr. Van Tulleken said in Ultra-processed-people,

"we've been told we just need to make different choices, when really we're living in a food environment that makes it nigh-on impossible"

Dr. Van Tulleken

By 2024, we now see twice the amount of plastic in our brains that we did in 2016 - up to 7 grams - enough to make a plastic teaspoon. Nobody chose to eat/drink that. There is now so much information and conflicting advice, and indeed, the 35,000 decisions we need to make each day strain our system that evolution has ill-prepared us for.

If careful use of AI can genuinely support people to make healthy decisions, with autonomy and affordability, then it's taking some agency back, like AI judo to flip the centre of gravity over information. Maybe we can use the AI to solve the problems created by the system that made the AI.

Its creators will use it to attempt to subdue, exploit and control. However, the product of the system is also a powerful tool against the system. Meals are a start. Start to take back control in a world increasingly shaped by processed convenience, populist power-mongers and capital harvesting algorithms.

The AI Genie is out of the bottle. We can each invoke our machine-learning Mephistopheles from our rectangular 'vade mecum' scrying glasses. But we must carefully consider what Faustian pacts we make.

"For what shall it profit a man, if he gains the whole world, and suffers the loss of his soup?"

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Zeno-of-Citium

2. https://iep.utm.edu/cynics/

3. https://etymology.net/cynic-cynicism/

4. Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists C. D. Yonge, B.A., Ed.

5. Ulster Scots colloquial for rootling in Garbage

6. https://www.shortform.com/blog/how-to-let-go-of-ego/

7. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:2013.01.0003:book=5:chapter=47&highlight=lentils

8. https://www.nih.gov/how-covid-19-can-lead-diabetes

9. https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/articles/costoflivinginsights/food

10. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3524146/Why-blueberries-really-best-food-health-preventing-wrinkles-warding-Alzheimer-s-reveal-10-benefits.html

11. https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/01/at-least-12-hepatitis-a-cases-linked-to-ah-frozen-blueberries/

12. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/study-miscalculation-has-everyone-talking-about-black-plastic-spatulas-again/

13. https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-health-and-environmental-risks-pfas

14. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-are-ultra-processed-foods-and-are-they-bad-for-our-health-2020010918605

15. https://www.chemsynthesis.com/base/chemical-structure-9433.html

16. https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-united-states-over-last-50-years/

17. https://www.mskcc.org/news/why-is-cancer-rising-among-young-adults

18. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39830235/

19. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ultra-Processed-People-Stuff-That-Isnt/dp/B0BL1VYBXK/?tag=morewretchtha-21

20. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/nutrition-and-health-the-issue-is-not-food-nor-nutrients-so-muchas-processing/0C514FC9DB264538F83D5D34A81BB10A

21. https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l1949

22. https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2020/october/lost-franklin-expedition

23

*Some people feel the tinned food has been maligned, and lead may have come from the water system or other sources.

24. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-04-29-fo-28432-story.html

25. https://www.noplasticnoproblem.com/blog/plastic-linings-in-canned-foods-and-drinks-leach-microplastics