TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

I always assumed replicator food was identical every time because the ship's "recipe book" is just a giant pattern buffer. It's always the same so it's easy to tell the difference from home made since there's always a little variability. You can't copy a person in the pattern buffer since that's illegal cloning, but copying anything from a coffee to a car is totally fine as long as your pattern buffer and replicator is large enough.

Its almost certainly something like this, i bet its actually all coming from replicator allowance.

In voyager, Harry Kim mentioned saving up replicator rations to replicate a clarinet. I assume the same can be done for any hobby.

Nothing would stop anyone from slowly replicating an entire kitchen (except maybe physical space constraints), then replicating basic ingredients to cook everything else, possibly even saving rations that would go to complex dishes in the long term.

If that's the case I bet Miles runs a perishables storage business on the side. Pop some fresh beef into the transporter buffer and at the end of a five year mission it tastes like it was dry-aged 90 days.

I'm pretty fussy with the food that I like, and sometimes there are times when I choose to cook certain meals myself, rather than have a friend or partner do it. It's not that what they'd make would be bad, but it certainly wouldn't be the same.

I imagine it's similar to my current relationship to programming software. I'm a more proficient programmer than the vast majority of people (a fact that is easy to forget when hanging out in techy spaces online), but I rarely code my own software. I mostly use open-source stuff nowadays, so I occasionally tinker to make changes, or add minor features, but most software I regularly use is far too large and complex for me to make much sense of. I imagine that programming in new replicator recipes would require a high level of food chemistry and technical expertise.

not hand churned with high fat cream, sugar, real vanilla beans

Something that I find very cool about our present day food science is that even though we know so much, there's still an incredible amount we don't understand.

Soy sauce is a good example — brewing of it using traditional methods involves fermenting in large barrels over the course of many months. There aren't many places that still make it that way nowadays — most use chemical hydrolysation to cut the process down to a few days. The taste of the traditionally made stuff is much better, but it's expensive enough that I can't justify buying it. I am glad I bought a bottle and got to try it, but in most cooking contexts, it's not really worth using because the nuances of its flavour will be lost or overpowered in the process. I used it sparingly, and I relished it in those contexts, but I also needed to make sure I wasn't too reticent in using it, lest I lose it to time. Since finishing the one bottle I had, I haven't bought another one (though I've been tempted).

I like your speculation about nutrition, but I find the idea of replicated food being nutritionally complete to be too implausible to believe. After all, sci-fi works best when it builds on top of established science, and the taste of food is so intrinsically linked to its chemistry that I can't imagine replicated food being able to even approximate the taste of things without being faithful to the underlying chemistry. I agree that the taste is likely only an approximation, but I imagine that for most people, this is good enough — just like most people would find a £30 bottle of soy sauce absurd.

In the 2300s, we have Joseph Sisko; today, we have Yasuo Yamamoto. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, eh?

I guess if the replicator forces the components of the food to have certain nutritional requirements that makes sense, but it's also kind of fucked up if it changes the taste so much from what you actually want that you can tell the difference.