Yet the whole concept of molecular gastronomy might be less threatening if it were to be just nothing more than a marketing tool of the moment. Fads will pass and diners will soon revert back to their old eating habits. If the phenomenon persists, it might very well move towards a direction that departs from our traditional concept of cuisine, one that leads us away from the fundamental emphasis on taste, quality and excellence in culinary skills to a simplistic pursuit of novelty.
Just as the cuisine nouvelle movement was carried to excesses in the 1970s, molecular gastronomy can be taken overboard—will we really be treading on the path forecasted by French chemist Marcelin Berthelot in 1894, that food in the year 2000 will be reduced to chemically produced flavour and nutritional pills? Will science kill the soul in our food?
Chef Stroobant gives a perfect retaliation: “The soul has nothing to do with the techniques. It is like refusing to use the internet because receiving a letter and opening the envelope is more romantic that downloading an e-mail. The content of my electronic message, the passion expressed in it, the love and the energy coming through the words displayed on your screen will not be different if I were using a pen. It would simply be slower.”
Perhaps our resistance towards molecular cuisine is not unlike our initial reaction towards information technology. The objectives of molecular gastronomists, if the aim of the Introduction of Innovative Technologies in Modern Gastronomy for Modernisation of Cooking (INICON) project sponsored by Herve This and his movement are anything to go by, are not to recreate the concept of food, but to improve and elevate cuisine as we know it now through understanding.
The official INICON website (www.inicon.net) states “Science can only change the culinary activities if it helps the cooks to prepare the dishes; it can probably not change the kind of food we eat… Berthelot forgot that our sensory apparatus, created by millions of years of evolution, has a function: telling the brain that what we are eating, and giving some pleasure when the food is appropriate from the physiological (and psychological) point of view. Science would do a better job if it helped the cooks to cook better and to obtain more regularly appropriate textures and tastes from the raw products.”
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