My partner and I had a conversation recently about the process of learning how to make traditional food from family members. They remarked that their grandma could just touch dough and know how to alter the recipe by poking at it. Or she would say things like, “it rained yesterday” and adjust. In other words, the only way to learn how to make all this stuff was not just to follow the recipe, but to make it over and over with a master and learn the little adjustments.
Compare that to how food is mass produced. Rather than needing a master to adjust the recipe, the entire point is to use processes and ingredients which can be worked with to get consistent scalable results.
And my take is that there’s something fundamentally different between the sorts of foods that can be made through industrial processes and ones that can be iterated on and learned by humans to be made by hand.
I’d love to hear more about this if you have experience
I will say the art is less in the food, but more in the machines and packaging equipment, but running a clean line is abit of an art form, as most machines are stacked together pieces from a bunch of different setups. Like, I've seen an old candie dispenser used to distribute small snack cheeses into containers. Food science is great. Most plants are these kinds of slap dash amalgamations of equipment. Maybe the process itself is scientific, but getting to that point takes some imagination. Basically, the art is in designing the kitchen so to speak. People who play Factorio (I know the dev sucks don't at me) will get what I'm saying.