On Tuesday, April 10th, I had the pleasure of attending a wonderful lecture by Hervé This, a scientist with the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in Paris, whose name I recognized as the author of a book on my wishlist (love that cover!). The event was part of the New York Academy of Sciences' Science of Food Series. The Academy is one of the tenants of 7 World Trade Center. More than five years after you-know-what, the address is still heavy with connotation, but this new, "green" building is quite spectacular and beautiful enough to make you forget where you are. Using the spiffy destination elevators (you punch in your desired floor on a keypad in the lobby and are directed toward the buttonless elevator car that zips you up to your destination directly) I reached the 40th floor and joined a crowd of scientists, students, and food lovers like me to hear what M. This (pronounced à la française: "teess") had to say about molecular gastronomy.
Hervé This holds the world's only PhD in molecular gastronomy, which is a term that has been tossed around promiscuously, mainly to describe the innovations of chefs like Ferran Adrià, Grant Achatz, and Heston Blumenthal, to name some of the most prominent. In the popular imagination, molecular gastronomy intends to redefine food as we know it and create Jetsons-like Food Of The Future, so solids become foams and gels and liquids become powders and cubes. M. This, with Hungarian physicist Nicholas Kurti, coined the expression, which basically covers the "physical and chemical aspects of cooking," as he writes in his Introduction to the English-Language Edition of Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor. He started the presentation by making the distinction between science, which produces knowledge, and technology, which brings knowledge into application. The craft of cooking is the practical application of the science of molecular gastronomy.
Science, he said, attempts to refute theories. M. This has collected over 25,000 old wives' tales, as he called them, from French culinary books. Of course, there are techniques passed from generation to generation that work and do stem from genuine innovation, e.g., puff pastry. On the other hand, there is the French superstition that links broken mayonnaise to menstruation. M. This questions them all, as would any good scientist, and is curious to see what is true. It turns out, for example, you can make chocolate mousse without eggs, and a perfect mayonnaise can be prepared easily in the lab with ultrasound. Why, then, do we insist on using a whisk (a "Middle Ages" tool, he called it)?
There is an undeniable emotional and nurturing aspect to cooking, which M. This referred to as the "I love you" effect, meaning that you can show love through hard work. I doubt there are very many successful "come over to my place" dinner dates that center around tossing a frozen pizza in the oven. We woo with elaborate preparations and presentations. Therefore, a reconstructed vegetable dish, say, in which textures are manipulated in unexpected ways and subtleties are caressed and underlined is truly a labor of love, not just a display of weirdness or empty vanity. He partners with the great chef Pierre Gagnaire in Paris and they come up with an invention every month to feature at Gagnaire's eponymous restaurant. The pictures of some of these dishes from the website are truly breathtaking.
Although this lecture was by a scientist—he spends most of his time in the lab—for scientists, I didn't feel out of my depths. There were plenty of slides showing beastly equations and graphs with Greek letters, but these were used as illustrations, and M. This was such an engaging speaker that I was able to ignore these and focus entirely on his accessible examples. He received a hearty, scoffing laugh when he told us Lavoisier, the father of chemistry, attempted to measure the density of meat stock with six digits. The inherent folly of that flew right over my head, just like that semester of high school chemistry I had to take twice, but M. This never lost my eager attention.
When asked about natural vs. artificial ingredients, he emphatically said that there are no natural ingredients. Using the example of a carrot, he explained that the "original" carrot was a hard stick about as big as a pen. The carrots we know and love have been bred by our ancestors; here, agriculture is the application of science. He also declared that artificial is preferable to natural. Nature, he said, is deadly! Would we prefer being outside on a cold day, exposed to the elements, or in a man-made, "artificial" edifice? I guess it really is a modern luxury to romanticize nature, since we've so successfully distanced ourselves from it.
There was a reception afterward, and his book was offered for sale and signing. How could I resist a personalized copy as a memento of this absorbing lecture? We chatted very briefly, and he told me he had asked thousands of chefs if they considered themselves artists or artisans. Not one, he said, dared call himself an artist. He didn't mention if those he asked were French, but I assume so, as in French there is more of a distinction than in English. I can think of a few American chefs who wouldn't hesitate to skip the artisan label, which earns respect in Europe, and go straight for god or guru, which will get you a TV show or at least a product line.
There is a podcast of a phone interview with M. This in which he covers quite a bit from the lecture. Podcasts of previous lectures in the Science of Food Series and of several other fascinating presentations are listed on the website. I've downloaded a dozen or so that are bound to be interesting. Now, if only science could explain why we're supposed to care about paternity tests for dead bimbos' babies, why talk radio hosts can still make headlines, why an article about grilled cheese sandwiches actually got published in the New York Times...
Hervé This's homepage (in French)
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