The New York Times had and interesting s piece on this program in the December issue "The Year in Ideas". From the developer's website:
Synaesthetic Recipes: Articulating Cravings
Hugo Liu and Matthew Hockenberry (2005)
"What's for dinner?"
In this work, we explore a technological answer to that famous question. Few of us know with great certitude the exact food we crave, but instead, we stew on the question and explore the nature of our craving through imaginative descriptions: "I feel like something light, fresh, sophisticated, not too mushy -- something influenced by thai or indian ingredients, something aromatic." Synaesthetic Recipes is a visual search program which allows such imaginative textual descriptions, and uses these to drive recipe recommendations. In the backend, a database of 100,000 recipes are automatically annotated with common sense about food. An artificial intelligence robotic reader reads each recipe and based on tastes of the ingredients and the types of cooking procedures, predicts how a food will look, taste, and smell. We are translating recipes into the rich descriptive vernacular of how people naturally conceptualize their cravings for food.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/research/index.html
The movie is amusing: "Synethetic Recipes: foraging for food with the family, in tate-space." Supposedly the program will be made available this year. Should be fun to play with it.
Regards, Bob