Also I am of the opinion that the best way to make a meal is a purpose built series of small machines to perform different tasks. So you have an onion preparation machine which peels and cores the onions and maybe also performs onion-specific slicing. You have a vegetable washing machine to wash potatoes and carrots and zucchini etc. You have various cutting chambers that feed in to various cooking systems.

Doing all of this is possible today and I don’t believe it has to be limited to the low quality food you mention. But developing all of these specialized systems is extremely expensive. I actually really hope to work on all of this stuff as a massive open source project once my open source farming robot project gains enough traction. I literally obsess over this problem.

Otherwise you could imagine something like a pair of robot arms and a vision system on a track in a normal kitchen, but again robotics really hasn’t been able to produce functional or affordable human like hands, and the software to handle them is also in its infancy (that part is an “AI problem” though.

Anyway robotics is extremely expensive and low minimum wages means it’s cheaper to abuse migrant workers in the kitchen than pay for all the R&D necessary to really solve these problems.

But my hope is that an open source project could get the ball rolling and then the costs required to finish everything could be spread among many different groups once the basic concept is proven.