Dessert

 

Dessert had arrived. Ice-cream, smothered in thick chocolate sauce and generously topped with peanuts. It was rich, but not decadent – not strictly healthy either, but neither so sugary as to be overwhelming.

That was a tough balance to reach and varied a lot per person and mood. In fact, each bowl was customized to each person. It had taken a while, and a lot of surveys to reach a point where it was really dialed in, but it was worth it.

The apps on everyone’s watches kept track of their days – their exertions, other meals and moods. It was maybe a little OCD, but the whole setup was an experiment within an experiment. To see what kinds of data people could generate and how if they shared it with cooperative partners how things could be improved.

This was the end of the twentieth two week stretch of heavy tweaking, and everyone would change meals and tasks for the next month. For the next little while they would bounce around on random things, and see what the group wanted to overanalyze next.

Tonight was a final check of their recent findings, a way to celebrate the release of the final decisions for those products.

Each group of fifteen had a guest tonight. Someone from the outside who would verify that the work was worth doing, and publish the standardization of the process.

It wasn’t strictly necessary, as the groups self-policed and evaluated things fairly well on their own. The extra scrutiny was a good yardstick for how different it was outside the program.

In the outside world, most bulk ingredients were standardized, so more complicated or foreign dishes were the main things that provided variety. It was difficult to try and find meaningful choices within specific food groups.

For example, most chocolate was made at one of three larger centers and shipped world wide. The quality was good, but for efficiency only a few types were made. Smaller artisan makers supplemented the supply locally, but never in quantities large enough to ship.

The program was there to find the best things that could be made at a medium scale. Large enough to ship at a regional level, but small enough to allow for variety within overlapping areas. Without the market forces determining winners and losers, finding the ‘best’ with any degree of certainty was a slippery target.

The guests were often ones that were involved in the largest scale of production and they often changed their formulae based on the testers findings. Something middle of the road, flexible and yet distinct enough to notice when it was present in a larger dish. 

 

Tonight, as the dessert course was served, the atmosphere was buzzing with anticipation. The customized bowls of ice cream, smothered in thick chocolate sauce and topped with crunchy peanuts, represented the culmination of weeks of meticulous adjustments and surveys. Each spoonful was a testament to their dedication to finding the perfect balance between richness and healthiness. The guests, eagerly digging into their bowls, would play a crucial role in verifying the program's worth and eventually publishing the standardized process.