I SHOULD LIKE TO CONCLUDE by briefly taking up a series of topics that will need to be considered more carefully if note-by-note cooking is to win broad popular acceptance: the nutritional value of pure compounds; the level of toxicological risk entailed by their use; the selection of suitable compounds, and their commercial availability; and the political issues raised by note-by-note cooking in relation to agricultural production, food safety, energy use, and public education.
Humanity is at a turning point in its alimentary history. In the industrialized countries, our generation is the first not to have known famine. At the same time we are witnessing the early stages of an obesity pandemic because our bodies were not designed to cope with the abundance of foods presently available to us and because older styles of cooking, which developed in a world of far more limited resources than today, are no longer appropriate to the situation in which we find ourselves. Fortunately, our brain is an adaptive mechanism that can help us find ways of overcoming this crisis—if only we put our minds to it! Note-by-note cooking is a product of human ingenuity that will both concentrate our attention and reward the application of intelligence and imagination.
I must begin, however, by confessing my own incompetence in this matter, and perhaps that of nutritionists as well. It is, of course, well known that foods must provide the human organism with water (evaporated chiefly through the skin) and enough fuel to produce the energy we need to live every day, on the one hand, and to replenish the body’s energy reserves as they are depleted, on the other. Food in its traditional form therefore consists of three primary substances: lipids, proteins, and carbohydrates. Quantity isn’t everything, however. In order to function, we need particular kinds of lipids, particular kinds of proteins, and particular kinds of carbohydrates—all combined in the right proportions.
First, lipids. All cells are bounded by a membrane, which consists of a double layer of phospholipids. Our bodies manufacture these compounds from the fatty substances we ingest. They contain mainly triglycerides, which we discussed earlier. A triglyceride is an organic compound with three fatty-acid residues bonded to a glycerol molecule. Digestion releases these and other fatty acids, which then pass into the bloodstream. (Since we are constantly being bombarded with dietetic information these days, perhaps I need not add that there are different sorts of fatty acids, and that the molecular properties of various triglycerides depend on the precise proportions in which their constituent compounds are combined. For the moment, however, these proportions are not fully known.)
Second, proteins. Their digestion releases peptides and amino acids. These must be well suited to the biochemical needs of the human organism: they must be “balanced,” as the nutritionists are fond of saying. Eating meat and fish provides us with a combination of proteins similar to the ones that make up our own flesh, but by themselves they do not constitute a healthy diet. Many other animals eat insect larvae, for example, but the unbalanced amino acid content of such meals must be supplemented by other kinds of compounds.
Carbohydrates form the third element of the triad. Earlier we saw that glucose, slowly released by modified starches, for example, plays an important role in human energy metabolism. Another carbohydrate, cellulose (which, like glucose, is a polysaccharide, though an indigestible one), is used as a bulking agent in various processed foods. Note-by-note cooks may find it useful to incorporate cellulose fibers in preparations that will be regularly consumed over an extended period.
These three groups of compounds, essential though they may be, are not the only things we need in our diet. Medical research on scurvy, a disease to which sailors making long voyages at sea were particularly prone in the past, led finally in the early twentieth century to the discovery of vitamins, another group of compounds that are indispensable for vital functions. Similarly, the study of cretins of the Alps, as they were called—mountain peoples in Europe suffering from goiter, an enlargement of the thyroid gland caused by a lack of dietary iodine—led to the discovery of oligoelements satisfying specific nutritional requirements. Today oligoelements are reasonably well understood, with regard to both their chemical properties and the quantities in which they must be consumed in order to sustain life.
Nutritionists have their work cut out for them. An enormous amount of research will be required if we are to be able to construct note-by-note dishes having the same nutritive value as the foods we have grown up eating. This will be a labor of decades. But the time and effort will have been well spent, for the challenge of feeding as many as nine billion human beings by the end of the twenty-first century promises to make the replacement of traditional cooking by note-by-note cooking unavoidable. For the moment, however, no one should fear that choucroute, coq au vin, and all the other delicious items of the traditional repertoire (delicious, at least, when they are well prepared) are endangered species. We should rejoice instead at the prospect of a multitude of splendid new creations being added to them. Even if note-by-note dishes are not nutritionally balanced to begin with, their dietary value will steadily increase as scientific research gathers pace. In the meantime, they will offer us marvelous and utterly novel sensations.
I invite anyone who asks whether the search for novelty in cooking is a futile endeavor to consider music. Is it futile that music, which has delighted human beings for thousands of years, should forever go on developing in new ways? Is it futile that painting goes on changing? Sculpture? Literature?
Earlier I approvingly quoted the biblical reference (in Deuteronomy) to the good Lord’s rich storehouse. Yet we should not be so naive as Voltaire’s Pangloss and Candide, who considered our world to be the best of all possible worlds. Our world is full of dangers, and our humanity—what makes us human beings and not merely animals—is but a long apprenticeship to prudence, which as creatures of a hostile planet we neglect only at our peril.
I do not mean that nature does not provide us with what we need to survive. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it today! But nature is not therefore our friend. Anyone who eats a wild vegetable without knowing exactly what it is risks being sickened, even killed by it. In this, as in every other aspect of our lives, we are constantly obliged to take precautions. The human race has long been incapable of living naked, having lost its protective coat. We need clothes (which are artificial, of course, because we have made them ourselves) for protection not only from the sun, but also from the rain and the cold. Without medicines, without hygienic products and certain kinds of cosmetics, we would not live far past reproductive age. It is only on account of human contrivance and invention that average life expectancy in a few fortunate countries of the world has now reached eighty years or more. Nothing could be more plain: nature is not always good; if it were, humanity would not have to shield itself against it at every turn.
In earlier chapters I touched briefly on the dangers associated with the use of compounds in note-by-note cooking. Quite obviously the reason for concern is very real. But the way in which the question is usually posed—Is this or that compound good for you?—is too general to serve any useful purpose. Every time you hear the phrase “good for you,” pay attention to the context in which it occurs. A fatty acid that is good for the heart may nonetheless happen to be bad for the brain. A certain antioxidant phenolic compound may protect against heart disease, but it may nonetheless cause other pathologies. Conversely, an alkaloid that is popularly thought to be injurious to health may turn out to have benign pharmaceutical applications that become known only as a result of rigorous testing.
The problem is therefore by no means a simple one. Paracelsus, in insisting on the importance of administering the right dose, laid down a sensible rule, it seems to me, for it is often true that a compound can have harmful effects only when it is given in amounts substantial enough to make it probable that a large share of its molecules will reach their receptors. This is why toxicologists consider a range of statistically likely outcomes. Toxicity usually appears only beyond a certain level of concentration, but in some cases it may be manifested immediately, and in others it may happen that low doses are beneficial, whereas higher doses have harmful effects. The vegetable kingdom is so varied, however, that in an even greater number of cases we know nothing, or next to nothing, about the toxicological effects of its members. Even so, scientific knowledge in this domain is not inconsiderable. It would be a crime not to put to good use the results patiently accumulated over many years by pharmaceutical researchers, who with the advent of note-by-note cooking will have a new scientific mission, and indeed an entirely new social role, that goes well beyond investigating the chemical properties of poisonous mushrooms.
Here again the Internet will perform a valuable service by allowing note-by-note cooks to quickly locate information about the known dangers posed by various compounds and compositions. There is, however, another kind of danger, which arises from the fact that anyone can say anything he likes on the Internet. Many websites advertising homeopathic and other kinds of alternative medicine give out false information. It is revelatory to compare the compendium of toxic plants compiled by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) with what some of the most popular sites say: whereas this comprehensive inventory makes reference to carefully controlled scientific studies, not a few of the same plants it identifies as toxic are offered for sale by online vendors who tout their benefits for human health.
Among the first plants one comes across in the EFSA compendium is
Aethusa cynapium, or small hemlock. Some websites advise that this plant (also known as dog poison or fool’s parsley) is the source of a homeopathic remedy. The idiocies—very possibly criminal idiocies in some cases—being foisted on an unsuspecting public are quite astonishing. One site claims that the toxic alkaloids this plant contains make it poisonous, but not lethally so; that in homeopathy
Aethusa cynapium is nevertheless a cure for milk allergy, which causes severe diarrhea in infants; and that it is also effective in reducing intestinal inflammation in adults. Think again.
Next on the list is Aframomum angustifolium. Popularly known as Cameroon cardamom, it contains 1,8-cineole, a compound fatal to human beings in doses as small as 0.05 milliliters. After that comes Aframomum melegueta, Melegueta pepper or alligator pepper, which contains piperin, an alkaloid found in pepper. Alas, ingesting even 0.35 grams of the seeds of this plant produces blurred or double vision in humans. Then there is a group of fragrant herbs known by the common name Agastache. Google this name and one of the first sites to appear, probably devoted to gardening, will tell you something like this: “The agastache plant, also called Mexican hyssop and used in making herbal teas, has a very marked fragrance; crumpled, its leaves give off a quite strong odor similar to mint; its flowers have an odor somewhere between anise, mint, and licorice. In addition to various decoctions that can be made from them, agastache leaves can also be used to flavor raw vegetables, salads, fish sauces, even cakes.” The problem is that the agastache plant contains significant amounts of methyl eugenol and estragole, both known carcinogens. Estragole, which is also present in tarragon, basil, anise, and fennel, causes liver damage; in rodents, it is toxic in amounts greater than two grams per kilogram of body weight, but in humans a limit of five grams per kilogram is judged to be acceptable. Neither this information nor the risks of consuming the plant documented by the EFSA compendium are to be found on the website that recommends using it to make teas and to flavor foods. If that website is your only source of information, you may be asking for trouble.
As for essential oils, freely sold over the Internet, where they are typically advertised as “100 percent pure and natural” (hemlock, of course, is natural as well), their estragole content may be 80 percent or higher. Some websites nevertheless assure visitors that these oils are stomachic, diuretic, carminative, antispasmodic, anti-inflammatory, antiviral, and antiallergic, and that they are recommended for the treatment of aerophagia, slow digestion, gastritis and colic, hiccups, spasmophilia, motion sickness, menstrual pain, dysmenorrhea, muscular cramps and contractions, neuritis, sciatica, spasmodic cough, and allergic asthma. What don’t they cure?
For better or for worse, few of us are about to give up tarragon or basil just because they contain estragole. Let’s move on, then, to Anacyclus pyrethrum, Spanish chamomile or Mount Atlas daisy. Hildegarde of Bingen (1098–1179), a German Benedictine abbess whose works include a volume on self-medication, recommended it in these terms: “Spanish chamomile reduces the toxins that contaminate the blood, increases pure blood, and clears the mind. It gives renewed strength to anyone who is weak, indeed failing, and lets nothing leave the body that has not already been digested, but to the contrary assures it a good digestion.” The EFSA compendium indicates, however, that the plant’s seeds have caused miscarriages in pregnant rats when they are fed for ten days following copulation a dose of 175 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Fetal malformations were commonly observed as well.
Then there is Anadenanthera, a genus of plants containing indolamines derived from tryptamines, among them bufotenine and beta-carbolines. The seeds of its species are hallucinogenic. Specimens may be obtained from web-sites devoted to ethnobotanical art, for example. One such site cautions visitors that the seeds it sells are for horticultural use only, without, however, explaining why.
Angelica sinensis, also known as dong quai and female ginseng, is recommended by self-styled specialists in naturopathic medicine for people looking to begin a successful weight-loss program. And yet it contains between 0.2 and 0.4 percent essential oils, prominently among them safrole (carcinogenic in rats and mice) and furanocoumarins (or furocoumarins), many of which are toxic not only to insects, but also to mammals.
Yet another example near the head of a very long list is
Annona squamosa, popularly known as cinnamon apple or sugar apple, an edible green plant with a strange-looking fruit covered by scalelike protuberances. Its pulp is creamy and sweet and, as in other plants of the Annonaceae family, contains a great many black seeds. Eating these seeds and drinking infusions made from the leaves are associated with various types of atypical Parkinsonism. The list goes on.
Artemisia umbelliformis, white genepi, used in making liquor of various kinds, nonetheless contains alpha- and beta-thujones that have neurotoxic effects. And so on. And on and on.
Some risks are less alarming than others. But they are nonetheless very real. Oxalic acid and oxalates, for example, are toxic substances found in many plants (cocoa, walnuts, hazelnuts, rhubarb, sorel, spinach) that can cause severe local irritation, being easily absorbed by the mucous membranes and the skin, and lead to circulatory problems. When ingested, they can irritate the esophageal and gastrointestinal tracts and cause kidney damage (stones, oliguria, albuminuria, hematuria); in large doses they can be lethal if the precipitation of calcium oxalate into stones blocks the urethra. Again, no one is about to forego a rhubarb tart or salmon with sorel sauce. But nor should anyone suppose that these dishes are completely harmless!
Cooks are therefore well advised to take the warnings in the EFSA compendium seriously and to avoid taking undue liberties. Borago officinalis, better known as borage, has an agreeable taste of cucumber, and its flowers have a pleasant oyster flavor. But beware: borage contains toxic unsaturated pyrrolizidine alkaloids. More dangerous still is Cinnamomum cassia, China cinnamon, which contains coumarin. The acceptable daily intake of coumarin has been put at 0.1 milligram per kilogram of body weight. A simple calculation shows that this dose is greatly exceeded by a teaspoon of the spice—hence, the importance of distinguishing between China cinnamon and Ceylon cinnamon (Cinnamomum zeylanicum), which has a negligibly small amount of coumarin. Coumarin is also present in varying amounts in parsley, celery, parsnips, and bison grass. The use of this last substance as a flavoring agent has led American authorities to prohibit the sale of certain vodkas—much to the dismay of the same connoisseurs who are outraged by the risks associated with pesticide residues in foods.
There’s no point working our way through the EFSA compendium much further, I’m afraid. We’ve gotten only as far as the letter C, and already we have been able to form a fair idea of how irrationally some people will behave even when they have good reason to be cautious. This isn’t likely to change any time soon.
The note-by-note cook must have ingredients. Which ones should he use? How can he get hold of them? Each of these questions can be approached in a number of ways. With regard to selection, the outstanding fact, as I say, is that presently there is no list of compounds organized by their molecular characteristics and accompanied by warnings of precautions needing to be taken when they are used for culinary purposes. One could, of course, begin with the more or less comprehensive inventory of traditional ingredients that is available today to food scientists and technologists, who also have at their disposal a great many studies of particular types of compounds (phenolic compounds, fatty compounds, sugar compounds, and so on). The inventory of compounds occurring in traditional ingredients is far from being complete, however, and in the case of fruits, for example, the action of many of the principal compounds is still poorly understood. (Synthetic compounds will never be fully surveyed, by the way, for chemists are adding to their number all the time. One has only to recall the discussion of intense sweeteners in
chapter 3 to realize how frequently—and often how fortuitously—such additions are made.) But inventories and studies are almost beside the point. Even more than accurate information, what cooks tempted to experiment with note-by-note cooking need is practical guidance.
Let us therefore distinguish between pure compounds, which in a perfect world note-by-note cooks would use exclusively, and fractions, which may be thought of as analogues of the clusters of musical notes played by synthesizers. Like the basic elements of synthesized music, which do not have to be created one sound wave at a time, vibration by vibration, fractions are composites, combining a variety of compounds that separately stimulate receptors for taste, odor, color, and so on.
PURE COMPOUNDS
Pure compounds are already commercially available from many chemical suppliers. Just as companies that sell laboratory equipment have created special product lines for molecular cooks, companies that produce pure compounds will be able to find niche markets in the culinary field.
The term pure should perhaps be put inside quotation marks. Without entering into a lengthy discussion of the practical impossibility of achieving absolute purity, especially at a time when advances in chemical analysis have made it possible to detect the presence of a particular compound in virtually any sample of matter (another reason why the presence of pesticide residues in foods sold in markets should not be condemned out of hand, by the way), let me simply note that chemical suppliers nevertheless are required by law to specify the degree of purity of the compounds they sell. It is common to purchase compounds that are between 95 and 99 percent pure, even more. For dietary purposes, however, these impurities are significant, especially if the compounds in which they occur are used in great quantities (though, of course, any food, whether it is shipped from the farm or created artificially, is essentially water). Compounds sold today for dietary use must meet certain other labeling requirements as well (indicating whether they are food grade, kosher approved, and so on). Looking to the future, one of the chief questions needing to be answered is whether the manufacturers of such products should be allowed to sell them directly to cooks or whether cooks will have to order from a network of suppliers authorized to prepare dilutions under laboratory conditions in regularly inspected plants (like the ones presently operated by wholesale producers of pastry and cured-meat products).
My own view is that if large food companies are permitted to buy additives (by the ton, to be sure) directly from the manufacturer, then restaurants ought to be granted the same privilege. Anyone who claims I have been bought by the additives industry can count on my suing him for slander, by the way, because it is not true. I could easily get rich if I wanted to, but the plain fact of the matter is that I do not run a company that sells compounds for note-by-note cooking, nor do I own any shares in any such company. Nor is it clear, in fact, even considering the prospect of a substantially enlarged market for additives, that companies that currently produce them for the food industry will welcome the upheaval that note-by-note cooking is bound to bring about. For if cooks start to use compounds, what happens to additives? The very notion disappears because in that case every compound becomes an additive—a state of affairs that the present regime of food regulation is utterly inadequate to manage properly.
Legal definitions vary on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, a food additive is officially described as a substance added in small quantities to a food product for a technological purpose. Only those substances that figure in the so-called positive list of additives approved by the European Union and Switzerland (and identified, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, by the letter E followed by a three-number code) can be used for one of several main purposes: lengthening the shelf life of food products by limiting the effects of microbiological contamination (primary and secondary preservatives); lengthening shelf life by limiting the effects of chemical alteration (primary and secondary antioxidants as well as antioxidant enhancers); maintaining or improving physical structure (emulsifiers and texturizers); improving visual appearance (colorants). Today, in France, there are twenty-two approved categories of additives in all: colorants, preservatives, antioxidants, emulsifiers, thickeners, gelling agents, stabilizers, flavor enhancers, acidity correctors, antiagglomerants, modified starches, sweeteners, leavening agents, antifoaming agents, coating agents, emulsifying salts, flour-treatment agents, firming agents, moisturizers, bulking agents, packaging gases, and propellants.
Manufacturers of additives are not the only ones who stand to be affected by the disruptions that note-by-note cooking will cause. Companies that produce and sell OECs will likewise have to face new challenges posed by changing markets and a dramatically altered regulatory environment. Indeed, probably every company today that caters to the food industry will have to make room for small-scale artisanal producers, perhaps even individual entrepreneurs. This is exactly what happened with the advent of molecular cooking. Twenty years ago it was very difficult for chefs to obtain extracts such as agar-agar and carrageenan in the relatively small quantities they needed. At first, they were given free samples. Before long, though, middlemen stepped in, buying in bulk and selling to restaurants on a retail basis. It was a rather straightforward business: one had only to divide tons into kilograms and comply with the relevant legal requirements. Why should it be any different with the various compounds that note-by-note cooks will need?
Even if a product is prohibited by the laws of one country, thanks to the vagaries of electronic commerce it can often be ordered from a foreign source. I do not presume to judge the correctness or desirability of this practice; I merely observe that it is a fact of the world today. It seems equally obvious that governments will soon find themselves very busy monitoring the new markets that are now springing up all over the world as a result. A related question arises as to what will happen if one day individuals take production into their own hands, synthesizing compounds from substances they will have obtained in one way or another by means of a chemical process analogous to caramelization. However small the number of those bold enough to experiment in this fashion may be to begin with, they will need to be properly trained because in order to be certain that the compounds they create are harmless, they have to know exactly what they are doing.
Not long ago researchers in my laboratory were studying what occurs when a particular amino acid, cysteine, is heated in boiling water. What danger could there be in water, you may ask? Isn’t the boiling point of water much lower than the temperatures of which even home ovens are capable today? And isn’t cysteine found in many of the foods we eat, especially eggs? Correct on all counts—and yet our experiment was accompanied by the release of hydrogen sulfide, a nauseating and toxic gas. As chemists, we were naturally aware of the danger posed by this gas and took the precaution of diffusing it through a solution of sodium hydroxide, trapping it in the form of sodium sulfide, a solid and harmless substance. How many novice note-by-note cooks would know to do this, though?
It must be recognized that molecular transformations do sometimes yield toxic compounds. This is one of the reasons why caramelizing certain artificial sweeteners can be risky, for example. But caramelizing onions and other foods over high heat also needs to be done with care, for the temperatures reached are high enough to produce noxious substances. In recent years, for example, food scientists have conducted many studies on acrylamide, a molecule that is formed during the cooking of products containing flour (breads, pizzas, and so on). Smoking oil can rapidly become sickening as well: the suffocating fumes that rise up from an overheated pan contain acrolein, a very reactive compound that can become attached to molecules in the human organism and disturb bodily functions.
So, yes, note-by-note cooking will call for an abundance of caution. But this should come as no surprise: chemistry is closely related to cooking, both of them having come into existence once mankind learned to harness fire to its own purposes. And we all know you have to be careful when playing with fire!
FRACTIONS
If for one reason or another note-by-note cooks do not wish to deal with pure compounds, there is a simple alternative: to use fractions, obtained for the most part from vegetable and animal products. For several decades now, the food industry has been fractionating wheat and milk, which is to say separating these products into their component parts. In the case of wheat, this method is used to obtain bran, flour, gluten, and starch; with further manipulation, various thickening agents (modified starches, for example) can be derived as well. From milk, fractionation makes it possible to recover fats, lactose, various proteins, and mineral salts. Historically, separating milk fats into subfractions that have various fusing temperatures and then mixing a large amount of easily melted fats with a small amount of fats that melt only at higher temperatures led in turn to industrial production of new dairy products, such as spreadable butter, and new kinds of shortening for pastry making.
More recently, fractionation has been used to extract a variety of products from grape juice and wine, including phenolic compounds, sugars, and odorant fermentation compounds. Modern filtration techniques, together with specially designed membrane filters, make it possible in this case to produce original mixtures that have greater value than the basic raw material itself. After all, why go to the trouble of making thousands of liters of wine when you can produce compounds that will fetch a higher price?
What I am proposing today with note-by-note cooking, in effect, is that fractionation be combined with another chemical technique, cracking, which uses heat to break down complex organic molecules into simpler molecules. Whereas fractionation is a way of separating out the constituent parts of a liquid mixture or solid composite, cracking is a way of modifying the molecular structure of the fractions so obtained. Both of these techniques are well known in petroleum refining, where the hydrocarbons present in the kerosene fraction are heated to yield the smaller hydrocarbon molecules and alkenes used in making gasoline, for example. But they can be applied to any traditional food. Apples are an obvious candidate (in France alone apples are so abundant that the cider industry can’t turn all of them into cider), along with carrots, turnips, cauliflower, and, in addition to fruits and vegetables, animals and fish—even insects. Breeding, raising, and harvesting crickets on a massive scale would produce literally tons of protein, an encouraging prospect in view of the challenge of feeding a huge and expanding world population. Few people will want to eat insects, you say? Why not then process them to yield proteinacious fractions that could be used in new and more palatable ways in preparing other dishes?
For the moment, at least, there is no urgent need to go quite that far. But a growing number of companies already manufacture powders, concentrates, and other products from vegetables, fruits, meat, and fish. Until now their wares have been destined mainly for large food-processing firms, but marketing strategy is now beginning to change in response to increasing demand in the culinary sector. Before long, in addition to pure compounds, restaurant chefs and caterers will be able to obtain fractions as well. As in the case of molecular cooking, it may be expected that commercial entrepreneurs, working alone or in small groups, will step forward to act as intermediaries in the supply chain. Indeed, small-scale agricultural producers may be among the first to assume this role. After all, the basic components of a modern filtration system, a pump and a cartridge filter, are inexpensive. Business-savvy farmers will quickly see the point of adding to the value of their products directly at the farm, instead of selling them at ridiculously low prices to supermarkets via food wholesalers. Their example is likely to be followed by note-by-note cooks eager to take advantage of the availability of such equipment, just as molecular cooks acquired rotary evaporators in order to recover odorant fractions from raspberries, coconuts, coffee beans, and so on.
COMPOSITIONS
Let’s conclude this market survey—a sort of cook’s tour, if you will forgive me yet another play on words—by going back to the comparison with music I mentioned earlier. Synthesizer manufacturers soon came to realize that since composing music one sound wave at a time is too complicated a business for anyone to bother with except physicists and engineers, it was better to give musicians a restricted (though still very large) menu of possibilities in the form of preprogrammed combinations of notes. Hence the introduction and, not long after, the triumph of the modern synthesizer, whose sounds can now be heard everywhere, even in children’s toy stores.
It seems logical to suppose that suppliers of products for note-by-note cooking will likewise create specific combinations of compounds—extracts and compositions, as they are known in the trade—to simplify the chef’s task. We have already looked at existing industrial preparations of this sort. A new generation of products may carry on from where liquid vanilla extracts, which give the color, the smell, and a bit of the flavor of vanilla, and black and white truffle oils, which do something similar for truffles, left off. All such products are meant to remind us of familiar ingredients. The food-processing industry is aided in its selection of OECs by catalogs in which the number of strawberry flavors, for example, runs into the hundreds! These catalogs are organized not only by flavor type, but also by the type of use to which a particular product is suited (one doesn’t use the same OECs in manufacturing aerosol deodorants as in making pastries, for example). The specific purpose that is intended and in particular the type of odor that is desired introduce a further element of complication since particles that are to be dispersed into the air cannot be formulated in the same way as ones that are to be dissolved in a fatty substance. Naturally one hesitates to make very specific predictions about what the future holds, but it would be surprising if the development of note-by-note cooking does not considerably add to the number of suppliers and the number of services presently provided to the culinary sector of the economy.
Last, but not least, we come to what might be called the political aspects of note-by-note cooking. Let me make it clear at the outset that I use the word political not in the modern sense it has come to acquire from partisan disagreements about who should govern and how, but more generally in the ancient Greek sense of a polis: the public sphere in which members of a polity come together to deliberate on matters of common interest. I touched on this point at the beginning of the book, and it is only fitting that I return to it here, by way of conclusion, in view of its overriding importance. No matter how attractive the promise of note-by-note cooking may seem to true artists, there is a deeper and much broader reason for making the departure from culinary tradition that it represents. It is a way of responding to the concern we all share about the kind of world we will leave to our children. For it is our children and their children who will make up the world of tomorrow, which all of us must hope will be better than the one we live in today.
FROM FARM LAB TO TABLE
Many city dwellers forget that their food comes from agriculture and animal husbandry, and even those who do not are increasingly unaware of what farming today actually involves. Fewer and fewer people now live in the countryside. Agriculture relies to an even greater extent than before on mechanization and chemical fertilizers, which together have made it possible to increase production by an amount that not so very long ago would have been unimaginable. A farmer used to have to work an entire day just to feed four people; today, in the same amount of time, he manages to feed hundreds. And yet not all farmers have as easy a life as city dwellers. Now that there are seven billion of us on earth and counting, we all have an obligation to take an interest in the conditions under which the food so many people depend on is produced. This matter has a number of aspects, bearing not only on production capacity, but also on long-term environmental sustainability and the share of agriculture in a country’s gross national product.
The idea that agricultural products might be fractionated at the farm itself seems to me to point to a promising alternative to the present system. It is certainly feasible from the economic point of view (as I say, filtration equipment hardly costs more today than winemaking equipment). If farmers are to be able to sell their fractions, however, it will be necessary, at the other end of the supply chain, that cooks know how to use them. In the coming years, then, if we are to succeed in bringing about a virtuous circle in which all citizens will equitably share the benefits of proper nutrition, both farmers and cooks will need to be trained in the techniques of note-by-note cooking.
With regard to the question of environmental sustainability, so very much on people’s minds today, it may be helpful to recall that guano used to be imported to Europe from South America at great cost in order to amend the soil. When sufficient quantities could no longer be found to meet the growing needs of agricultural production, science came to the rescue. The synthesis of nitrates, without which many millions of people would have gone hungry or actually died from starvation, marked a great step forward. No doubt this is why the chemist Fritz Haber (1868–1934) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his research on the synthesis of ammonia. There is a terrible irony in this award, for Haber, a German Jew, had also contributed to the development of poison gas for use in chemical warfare during the First World War and later directed research that led to the production of Zyklon B gas, used during the Second World War to kill Jews from every part of Europe. Personally, I find it impossible to agree with the Nobel Committee’s decision in this case.
It is important to bear in mind that our present technical capabilities are very limited, at least by comparison with nature itself. Only a short time ago the synthesis of vitamin B12 required the concerted efforts of hundreds of highly skilled chemists. Vegetables, by contrast, spontaneously manufacture this compound with the aid of wind, rain, sun—and billions of years of biological evolution! If we are to make better use of the good Lord’s rich storehouse than we have so far managed to do even with modern methods of agriculture and food processing, we will have much yet to learn not only about vegetables, but also about chemical techniques for recovering their compounds. I say nothing about traditional methods of agriculture and land management. What a waste it is to burn forests when, in addition to cellulose, the lignin their trees contain can easily be extracted to make vanillin; when their plants are a source not only of medicines and cosmetics, but also of a great many sapid and odorant compounds that can be used in note-by-note cooking.
As against those who in their ignorance of chemistry believe that it occupies too large a place in our daily lives—wrongly confusing chemistry, which is a science, a branch of knowledge, with its applications—I maintain that what we need is more chemistry, not less; more knowledge, not less, about how atoms can be rearranged and manipulated for the benefit of mankind. It is to chemistry that we must look for instruction if we are to be able to feed ourselves, cure illnesses, and promote health in the years ahead.
REGULATION
People sometimes complain about government agencies responsible for safeguarding public health, ensuring the humane treatment of animals, prosecuting fraud, and so on. But they should pause for a moment and consider how fortunate they are that these agencies exist. Some of us are old enough to remember that toxic cooking oil killed hundreds of people in Spain in 1981. More recently, in 2008, greed led at least one dairy in China to market baby formula contaminated with melamine. In the most highly industrialized countries, where the risk of such behavior has been reduced to minute levels and where even the least threat to public health is immediately and widely publicized, it has been forgotten that only a century ago whole chapters of books on household management were devoted to telling home cooks how to recognize adulterated products. Scandals were common a hundred years ago, when milk was stretched with water, flour was bulked up with plaster, and coffee was flavored with slurry. One guide even recommended inserting a thin metal blade into baby gherkins to check if their green color had been enhanced with copper sulfate (if it had been, the blade would be coated with copper). Imagine how much copper sulfate must have been used back then!
People want to be protected, yet they lash out against the very same public bodies that were created to protect them. As unreasonable as this behavior evidently is, popular dissatisfaction is likely only to increase once note-by-note cooking becomes established, for it will disrupt long-standing business practices and render the laws and regulations pertaining to them obsolete—giving government agencies even more to do than before. In France, debate will certainly take as its point of departure the 1905 law I mentioned earlier, requiring that food products be “wholesome, genuine, and salable.”
WHOLESOMENESS
No one will dispute that new food products must be wholesome, even if this idea, taken to a logical extreme, borders on the utopian. After all, even water can be dangerous in large doses. As a practical matter, however, responsible practitioners of note-by-note cooking should not have any great difficulty satisfying this first requirement, at least so long as they rely on the familiar repertoire of proteins, lipids (oils, especially), and carbohydrates.
But even assuming that cooks do their best to take the necessary precautions, there will be accidents if irresponsible manufacturers and suppliers fail to notify them of risks associated with the use of a particular product. Earlier I mentioned the young German molecular cook who suffered horrible injuries from the explosion of a thermos bottle that he had filled with liquid nitrogen and then hermetically sealed, unaware that liquid nitrogen rapidly evaporates at room temperature. It may be confidently predicted as well that diners will be poisoned if chefs use compounds without due regard for toxic risk and the dangers posed by certain kinds of molecular transformation. But, as I say, accidents regularly occur with old-fashioned kitchen knives, whose dangers are known to everyone. Nothing new here, really.
Just so, the manufacture and sale of note-by-note products will have to be regulated in the public interest, albeit in a manner different from what we are used to today since the nature of the products will have changed. Toxicological studies will have to be diligently performed, with special attention to establishing levels of acceptable daily intake.
GENUINENESS AND SALABILITY
Genuineness in the culinary domain, no less than in any other, means that the product being offered for sale is in fact the same one that is purchased. In this connection, we need to distinguish between ingredients, on the one hand, and foods, on the other.
In the case of compounds, certifying authenticity is a straightforward matter, at least to begin with. The compound contained in a flask or other container bearing a label on which a degree of purity is advertised must be pure in the proportion indicated, and, of course, it must be what the label says it is. So far, so good—but things get complicated quickly. We have had occasion to observe more than once in the preceding pages that compounds may assume different forms. Menthol, for example, depending on its form, may or may not smell like mint. Product labeling must therefore be as precise and as detailed as possible.
The conditions in which compounds are stored cannot be neglected. Just as oils must be kept in a cool place, protected from the light in dark bottles (otherwise in nonreactive metal containers to prevent exposure to metal ions), so too care must be taken with certain compounds whose properties are modified by the weather—heat, humidity, and so on. Carotenoids, for example, may undergo isomerization, with the result that their colors change. In the event that the properties of a compound are altered during storage, a question may arise as to which party should be held legally liable, the manufacturer of the product or the purchaser who assumes responsibility for storing it. Fractions, because they often involve traditional (or at least familiar) ingredients, seem to pose few difficulties. Compositions are likely to be more problematic, however, and their status should therefore perhaps be left up to regulators to decide on a case-by-case basis.
The question of what dishes can legally be called presents an opportunity for making useful distinctions. Courts in a number of countries in Europe have upheld the right of restaurants to serve a coq au vin, for example, that has neither a rooster nor any wine, ruling that the dish can be made instead with a hen (or spring chicken) or grape juice or both. The courts are wrong to legitimize false advertising of this sort, I believe, just as they are wrong to allow a commercially produced sauce to be sold under the name “béarnaise sauce” even though it contains neither eggs nor butter. And yet, to be fair, food manufacturers are merely responding to changes in the way people cook today. Prepared mayonnaise is apt more often than not to be a kind of remoulade since it typically contains mustard—again, following the lead of cooks, both in restaurants and at home, who have gradually strayed from canonical recipes out of a taste for experimentation and a desire to be creative. Food manufacturers are not to blame for this, any more than cooks are. Nevertheless the courts were mistaken in my view to rule as they did.
There is no reason why note-by-note cooking should require such adjudication, however. Unless, of course, the names of dishes mention polyphenols that are nowhere to be found in them or unless a gibbs or a wöhler sauce is not what its name says it is. If note-by-note cooks are honest and show proof of due diligence in vetting new techniques and preparations, they should not worry about having to spend time in court that would better be spent in the kitchen.
THE ENERGY QUESTION
It is a matter of common knowledge that we are faced with an energy crisis. Whether fossil-fuel reserves are actually nearing exhaustion or not, a disputed point, prices for both raw materials and finished products have begun to rise. The culinary implications are unsettling. Start from the fact that in 2010, in France alone, cooking in all its various forms consumed the equivalent of roughly 2.4 million tons of oil and gas (not counting the energy used to heat the water used in cooking). Taking into account the fact that traditional cooking methods waste up to 80 percent of the total energy used, the reason for grave concern, if not quite yet for alarm, is obvious. In the winter, of course, the wasted energy is a welcome source of heat, but what about in the summer? Cooking over high heat naturally consumes the greatest amount of energy, but over time the slow reduction of a stock or a sauce amounts to an equally forbidding luxury—and all the more since filtering, properly done, would achieve the same result at much less cost. What is the point of each cook in a restaurant kitchen making his own reductions when consolidating the work of several stations would yield considerable energy savings? What is the point of making aspics from calves’ feet when the smallest and the largest kitchen alike could just as well use gelatin? It is no objection to say that very few kitchens make aspics in this way any more. Mountains of veal bones are still boiled every day to make stocks and demi-glaces and the like. Sooner or later the increasing cost of energy is bound to make such practices look like a pointless extravagance.
SOCIAL ACCEPTANCE
Just as molecular cooking aroused widespread resistance as a result of the food neophobia with which the human race is chronically afflicted, for better and for worse, note-by-note cooking will inevitably have more detractors than proponents, at least at first. And then there will be those who cannot make up their minds. One question that is frequently raised, a perfectly legitimate one, is whether this latest form of avant-garde cuisine is meant for everyone or only for a select audience of prosperous epicures who can afford to eat at expensive restaurants. Once again the answer is unequivocal: note-by-note cooking must aim to reach all citizens.
Let me be perfectly candid. The strategy that was devised to popularize molecular cooking and that has been adopted once more in seeking to promote note-by-note cooking is quite unashamedly based on an argument from authority. It is essentially the same strategy that Antoine-Augustin Parmentier used to win acceptance for the potato in France at a time when people refused to eat it—understandably so, since the Academy of Medecine had declared that eating potatoes caused leprosy! Parmentier, a pharmacist by training, served in the French army during the Seven Years’ War in Germany. Famine was still common, a lingering consequence of the Little Ice Age that was then drawing to a close in northern Europe. Parmentier observed that German peasants ate potatoes, which, unlike wheat, could be grown in cold weather on poor land. On returning to France, he devoted himself to the task of cultivating them and then, the harder part, getting people to try them. In a brilliant stroke, Parmentier managed to persuade Louis XVI to wear a potato blossom as a boutonniere. If the king liked potatoes, it must be because they were a luxury. Soon they were all the rage among the upper classes. The fashion gradually spread. Parmentier is said to have grown potatoes in a field that had been granted to him in the Plaine des Sablons district of Neuillysur-Seine, outside Paris, and arranged to have royal guards posted there. The guards were instructed, however, not to arrest thieves. The attraction of forbidden fruit proved to be enough to make the potato known among the middle and lower classes and, a few decades later, a familiar feature of the culinary landscape in France.
The same idea was quite deliberately placed in the service of molecular cooking through the International Workshop on Molecular and Physical Gastronomy, an annual event first held in Sicily in 1992, which brought together some of the best scientists and chefs in the world. Everything went according to plan. The vogue for the new cooking spread rapidly, especially in the most fashionable restaurants of the world’s major cities, where only people with enough money to treat themselves to a meal costing hundreds of dollars per person—the aristocracy of the present day—can think of eating.
Nevertheless the ultimate objective was to bring molecular cooking into the homes of ordinary people. For most families, changing the way they cook makes sense only if it will also save them money. Why buy eggs to make a chocolate mousse, for example, when there is no need for any? The recipe I devised some years ago for Chantilly Chocolate (in which chocolate is heated in water, producing an emulsion that you then whip to obtain a true mousse) proves the point. Why use ten eggs to make meringues for ten people when a single egg is enough to make quarts of the stuff? The educational system in France played a role as well in the promotion of molecular cooking by introducing students at a young age to a more sensible approach to cooking. Workshops on flavor were set up in primary schools, with an emphasis on simple experiments, leading to more advanced study of the science of cooking in middle and high schools.
For note-by-note cooking, the strategy remains the same. Once again young chefs are being invited to practice a modern art; a new style of cooking and eating is being proposed that young people can make their own (and that most older people will detest); and arguments from authority are being deployed with a view one day to making note-by-note cooking seem not merely obvious, but inevitable.
Still, I cannot imagine taking leave of you, my dear friends, with boastful promises of conquering the world—especially when we have been talking all this time about cooking, a joyful activity whose purpose is to bring human beings together in peace, and the radiant future that awaits food lovers everywhere, an age of brilliant new ideas that will provoke astonishment once they have been given sensuous form by artists whose first and foremost concern is to bring happiness to all those who dine at their table.
Everyone, each in his own way—artists, artisans, parents anxious for the future of their children, children eager to learn and to take their own place at the table of human culture—will be able to participate in a grand adventure, a truly new way of cooking that will be more, much more, than a mere fashion or trend. Together, in helping to construct a new way of cooking, we shall create a new way of eating. The future beckons us!
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