A21
Public Record
Excerpt From article.

The Allegory of the Two Chefs

At a small restaurant just outside of West Bermont, PM, the kitchen is run by two chefs.

One of the chefs is named Mauve. Chef Mauve has an inherent interest in preparing food. His talent is in finding and executing complex recipes perfectly. He has spent his life recreating everything he has tasted and enjoyed. His talent allows him create dishes better than the people who created the original recipes.

The other chef, Floot, has an inherent interest in the tasting and combining of ingredients. She has never followed a recipe. She has, however, created every combination of tastes she could ever think to create, and knows which ingredients she tends to find the most enjoyable. Her career has consisted of building a language around the different combinations of tastes that she encounters.

The dishes these two chefs create, however, the results are entirely different. Chef Mauve’s personal specialties are generally amalgams of existing recipes he knows well. Most people who take a blindfolded taste-test say that these two chefs are equal as far as “talent” is concerned. “Creativity,” however, is generally awarded to Chef Floot, while, Chef Mauve usually gets much higher marks in “consistency.”

Chef Mauve is a lover of prepared foods. He looks up to many chefs, and considers three of them to be his major influences. Chef Mauve makes a point to taste a new dish every day, and so seeks out food from his top influences, breaks down the tastes of the dishes, reverse-engineers their recipes, then improves upon them and serves them in the restaurant.

Chef Floot knows that if she follows her interest throughout the creation process, she can work by following her intuition. Intuition allows her to create without knowing what’s coming next. If she can remain long enough in a state in which intuition is driving her decisions, this is what she calls a “Flow State.” By the end of her creation process, her goal is to create something deeply interesting that emotes a feeling or emotion that she hasn’t yet experienced. If she achieves that goal, she considers her experiments a success. These are the dishes she chooses to serve in the restaurant.

To each of these if you were to say, “Recreate this recipe perfectly,” obviously the Chef Mauve would succeed, because that is where his experience lies. However, if you were to tell them each, “Using these ingredients, make me a dish you’ve never tasted before,” then obviously Chef Floot would create the more interesting dish. […]

Umbrin Crattlepod