Soup: The Fast Food Paradigm
Is Bespoke Fast-Food Soup a Dichotomy?
Can the fast food paradigm be successfully applied to the retail of soup for mass consumption, furthermore, can a model of flexible ingredient choice be integrated into the concept and thus can soups be generated ‘to order’ on a short time-scale?
The uniqueness and difficulty of the question is twofold. Firstly, the incorporation of two apparently divergent methodologies, in essence bespoke soups on a fast-food time-scale; secondly, the two themes must both hold true in order for a tangible paradigm shift to occur.
The first major problem becomes apparent whilst trying to define some initial parameters due to their subjective nature, such as: how do you temporally quantify the completion of a fast-food order, what is a bespoke soup, and how long does it take for a soup to cook?
Perhaps the most difficult condition to define is the time period it takes to cook a soup. This in itself will depend on a myriad of further variables also incorporating attributes contributing to the measurable success of the soup, e.g. whether the flavours have been successfully ‘married’, the soup’s ingredients and their biochemical composition, the passive transport of flavour molecules within, and dependant on, the cooking environment.
Clearly these boundary conditions need to be more accurately defined to be used axiomatically and in doing so would require a lot of further research. If one was to make a back-of-the-envelope calculation they might derive that the labour involved with producing a good bespoke soup might cause it to fall shy of the time expectations within the fast-food ideology. However, cutting edge research often reveals novel solutions to difficult challenges and this is often where the most important of all paradigm shifts are inspired and dichotomies collapsed.
L&S
References:
RP, O, et al., 2010.
