Noodles, noodles, everywhere. One of the more common foods in China is noodles, lots of them. You can find them around almost every corner, each with a different style. What’s more, they are lots of different varieties, like lamian or udon. And one of the most common forms of noodles is freshly sliced noodles. That means that with one blob of dough, and one knife, a chef gets a lot of noodles after a tiring chopping session. In larger restaurants, this is a customary job.
Well, the robots will be taking over now. A restaurant-owner named Cui Runguan decided to make his own robot to take over the job of a noodle-slicing chef.
The robot itself is relatively simple. It has two basic motions: slice back and forth (like a windshield wiper) and dump the noodles into a pot of boiling water. This simplicity, however, is also key to its appeal. At a stunning $2,000, this noodle-slicing robot costs less than half of the annual wages of the average chef. To the owner of a restaurant, this is very convenient, but prospective chefs, this could be devastating. However, slicing noodles is one of the jobs in the restaurant that is often considered tedious, because it’s tiring. So that means in reality, it won’t have a large impact on the jobs market, but rather will just remove one more arduous task.
So at this point, you might be wondering: are the noodles any different? Well, customers say that there is very little difference in quality between man-made noodles and those made by this robot. What’s more, they “look better,” according to one patron of the restaurant that made this robot. The noodles are made faster and more uniformly, so it’s clear that this robot is quite useful.
Of course, there have also been some jokes that equipping robots with razor-sharp knives isn’t the best way to prevent the robot apocalypse. But whatever. Human noodle cutters? Nah. I want my noodles robotic.
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