On Food and Cooking

investigate the whys of cooking and
encourage critical thinking. And several
highly regarded chefs, most famously Ferran
Adrià in Spain and Heston Blumenthal in
England, experiment with industrial and
laboratory tools — gelling agents from
seaweeds and bacteria, non-sweet sugars,
aroma extracts, pressurized gases, liquid
nitrogen — to bring new forms of pleasure to
the table.
As science has gradually percolated into
the world of cooking, cooking has been drawn
into academic and industrial science. One
effective and charming force behind this
movement was Nicholas Kurti, a physicist and
food lover at the University of Oxford, who
lamented in 1969: “I think it is a sad
reflection on our civilization that while we
can and do measure the temperature in the
atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what
goes on inside our soufflés.” In 1992, at the
age of 84, Nicholas nudged civilization along