Comprehensive
Reviews
in
Food Science
and
Food Safety
S everal years ago Dr. Herve This served as a peer reviewer
for a Journal of Food Science manuscript and on that occa-
sion informed me about his special interest which he called
“gastronomie moleculaire.” The term caught my attention and
I followed the concept as a recipient of his e-mailed newslet-
ters; unfortunately, I was severely handicapped by insufficien-
cies with my French. In my new role as editor of CRFSFS, how-
ever, I have turned more aggressive and have invited Dr. This
to provide information on his creation to the Institute of Food
Technologists. IFT has thousands of members with professional
interests in the various aspects of food preparation, those in the
Foodservice Division probably more so than others. Apparently,
“molecular gastronomy” effectively explains the difference be-
tween science and technology, between physicochemical phe-
nomena and the art of cooking. There is even a strong educa-
tional element embedded in this new concept coming to us from
France and it behooves our on-line sister publication, the Journal
of Food Science Education, to follow up on those aspects. Also,
it is imperative that the editor of Food Technology inform IFT’s
general membership about future details on what may be con-
sidered a major movement or development in the history of food
science/technology. In my opinion, Comprehensive Reviews in
Food Science and Food Safety is an appropriate means to convey
***
Molecular Gastronomy and the Foundation
“Food Science and Food Culture”
Herve This, Ph.D.
Groupe INRA de Gastronomie Moléculaire
Laboratoire de chimie des interactions moléculaires
Collège de France
11, place Marcelin Berthelot
75005 Paris, France
e-mail: hthis@paris.inra.fr
Cooking instructions in schools and universities
When the Editor of this journal heard about the creation
in France of the “Fondation Science et Culture Alimentaire”
(“Foundation Food Science and Food Culture”), he thought it
would be a good idea to share the information with the read-
ers of his journal. I shall certainly explain the objectives of this
organization at the end of this document, but in order to stimulate
interest and to prepare readers for future activities by the Founda-
48 COMPREHENSIVE REVIEWS IN FOOD SCIENCE AND FOOD SAFETY—Vol. 5, 2006
Editorial:
What’s All This
We Hear about
Molecular
Gastronomy?
both historic and futuristic aspects. I am grateful to Dr. This for
sharing with us his thoughts and providing a look at his creation.
Because this is an editorial, there was no peer review of this pa-
per. Of course, I take full responsibility for any problems that may
have slipped in during the process of rewriting and editing. INRA
is the French National Institute for Agricultural Research. The En-
glish language website is at http://compact.jouy.inra.fr/compact/
CONSULTER/INTER/external/departements/ecrans/47
Dr. This is affiliated with the Paris Centre of the Food
and Human Nutrition Dept.’s groups UMR 214 and INA P-G
(Joint Research Unit for Analytical Engineering Applied to Food
Quality).
Manfred Kroger
Scientific Editor, CRFSFS
Professor of Food Science Emeritus
The Pennsylvania State Univ.
tion, my proposal is to consider first what cooking means, then to
examine the objectives of the scientific discipline called molec-
ular gastronomy, and only then cover the rationale, objectives,
and current programs of the Foundation.
Whipping eggs to make chocolate mousse
Consider this statement by the wonderful late biologist Stephen
Jay Gould (from “La mal mesure de l’homme”): “It’s very efficient
to grasp great problems of general interest from details. There is
no use writing a book on ‘the meaning of life.’ Great problems
should be attacked from the side, and not directly.” So, let’s follow
his advice and begin by the preparation of a chocolate mousse.
Traditionally, chocolate mousse is obtained by melting choco-
late, sometimes with butter, adding egg yolks to this mixture
when it’s not too hot, whipping the egg whites, and mixing the
two preparations. With such a simple “recipe” the result can

C 2006 Institute of Food Technologists
Molecular gastronomy and the Foundation . . .
be easily predicted: the final flavor will be mainly due to its
chocolate (hence the relationship between ingredients and prod-
uct “quality”); the final consistency (not the texture, because we
have to clearly differentiate between the two) will be the re-
sult of a foam containing the butter-plus-chocolate preparation
softening the mass (with butter providing triacylglycerols having
lower melting points than those of chocolate, and also having
a broader chemical composition). Let’s now focus on the whip-
ping of eggs. The fresh egg whites are unimportant regarding fla-
vor; they only provide foamy consistency. The more foam, the
“lighter” the mousse. Whipped egg white is obtained by whip-
ping egg whites. Such a seemingly useless sentence is not useless
at all, if we consider the concept of whipping. Why should we
whip egg whites? The answer is: we want to introduce air bub-
bles. Egg white is roughly 90% water and 10% protein(s). If we
just whip, the whisk is introducing air bubbles whose diameters,
easily determined with a light microscope, will be about 0.01 to
0.1 mm.
Why so little foam?
This is the traditional question, but let’s consider a better ques-
tion: how much foam can we get from the white of one egg?
Generally, when egg whites are whipped, a volume of 1/3 L is
obtained. Why such a small foam volume? Imagine first the cre-
ation of only one large bubble with the liquid egg white around it.
Depending on various assumptions, the diameter of this bubble
would be between 30 and 300 m (!), and the volume would be
much more than 1/3 L.
Imagine now that we would like to keep our bubbles at a diam-
eter between 0.01 and 0.1 mm. Is 1/3 of a liter the maximum that
can be obtained through whipping? The question can be asked
differently: why is the volume limited to 1/3 of a liter? As whip-
ping two egg whites produces about twice the volume obtained
from one egg white, it means that something is missing to get
more foam. As whipped egg whites are primarily composed of
air, water, and proteins, we can guess that the “missing some-
thing” is either water or proteins (not air, as there is plenty of it).
Calculations and experiments show that water is indeed the lim-
iting factor, and this leads the 21st century cook (the one who
no longer sticks to recipes) to add some aqueous solution (wa-
ter plus flavor) into the egg white being whipped, thus obtaining
more and more foam (plus flavor).
Are eggs useful?
Are eggs important in this recipe? The yolk is clearly useful,
because it gives some flavor to the chocolate mixture. But the
egg white? Let’s look at milk. This is literally an emulsion: emul-
sion comes from the Latin word emulgere, which means “to draw
milk.” And all food scientists know that, indeed, milk is mainly
made of “oil” droplets (fat globules) dispersed in “water.” When
milk is allowed to rest, the oil droplets slowly rise upwards and ag-
gregate, forming a creamy emulsion much more fat-concentrated
than the milk below it.
Let’s whip cream: whipped cream is obtained by trapping air
bubbles in the emulsion. Using the “complex disperse system
formula” introduced some years ago (ECIS 2002), this can be
described by a simple equation. With O the oil phase, W the
water phase, G the gas phase, and/the “dispersion,” milk and
cream can be described as O/W, and whipping cream can be
represented by the “physical equation” O/W + G = (G+O)/W.
Now let’s change the ingredients, keeping the equation. For ex-
ample, as chocolate is all fat, at first approximation, let’s make an
emulsion with it: in a pan, put 200 g water (this “water” can have
flavor in it, such as being orange juice or tea, for example) and
225 g chocolate, then heat. The sugar contained in the chocolate
dissolves in the “water” during this process. After placing the pan
Vol. 5, 2006—COMPREHENSIVE REVIEWS IN FOOD SCIENCE AND FOOD SAFETY
on ice cubes and whipping its contents, a foamed emulsion is ob-
tained which has been called “chocolate Chantilly” (Le chocolat
Chantilly 1996). No egg whites are needed!
Why cooking?
What is the lesson of this investigation? Traditional practice is
not always a guarantee for technical success. Arriving at success
depends on asking questions. Therefore, asking questions is of
utmost importance. Of course, all scientists know that, but why
not also teach it in school? And, finally, invention, or technol-
ogy, is a natural result of scientific research. This, too, must be
communicated. Young people and their schooling are the keys to
tomorrow’s world. Are we going to produce informed consumers
and citizens, or do we prefer to restrict the enlightenment of in-
dividuals and leave them vulnerable to the manipulations and
schemes of specialized interests, which might include the food
industry? Satisfactory consumer education is not possible, and we
do observe today a frightening pandemic of obesity. Consumer
health is not entirely the foremost objective of an industry. Clearly
some food education is important.
Moreover, another social issue, namely, the growing dislike
for science, could be overcome through educational activities
based on science. In France, the Ateliers expérimentaux du goût
(Experimental Workshops on Taste), include school classroom ac-
tivities such as making one cubic meter of whipped egg white
with only one egg, as well as giving children some control over
their food through cooking (CRDP 2005). Food appeal is used as
an introduction, but the various programs are moving children
away from eating only, and leading them toward technological,
scientific, and cultural questions. In this way, tradition is not only
transmitted, but also questioned, as it should have been all the
time. This is one purpose of molecular gastronomy.
Molecular gastronomy
Molecular gastronomy, why such a pompous name? And is it
some useless activity of the idle rich or wealthy foodies? Of course
not! First, a differentiation should be made between cooking and
gastronomy. Cooking means preparing dishes, whereas gastron-
omy, according to the promoter of the word, means “intelligent
knowledge of whatever concerns man’s nourishment” (Brillat-
Savarin 2006). When this knowledge is history, the activity is
“historical gastronomy,” but when it comes to the study of chem-
ical and physical transformations involved in culinary practice,
then it is “molecular gastronomy.”
Is it simply food science? Not exactly. The reason why this new
scientific discipline was introduced by Nicholas Kurti and my-
self in 1988 (This 2002) was based on the observation that food
science had slowly drifted, over many decades, toward the in-
vestigation of food and toward technological processes, but not
toward culinary aspects. But multitudes of people cook every day,
and until the creation of molecular gastronomy, no scientific re-
sults were given to them about such common dishes as soufflés,
roasted chicken, mayonnaise sauce, and more. Certainly, molec-
ular gastronomy must be included in food science, but defining
it more clearly would be very useful, because some new and
important questions arise.
Is molecular gastronomy the same as “culinology”? One can
easily see a difference. First, culinology is a trademark; how can
science be patented? Clearly, there is knowledge behind this en-
terprise of culinology, but also money and communication. Doc-
uments issued by universities that teach culinology indicate that
it involves some education allowing chefs to cook differently.
Therefore, culinology is cooking and not molecular gastronomy.
The latter must be considered a scientific discipline because it is
about insights, understanding, and knowledge generation (look-
ing for mechanisms and establishing modes of action).
49
CRFSFS: Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety
More generally, and this needs repeating, according to Louis
Pasteur, science is different from technology, and “applied sci-
ence” is an oxymoron that cannot exist. First, science looks for
mechanisms of phenomena, whereas technology is using scien-
tific results to improve a technique or a craft. This is why “applied
science” cannot exist. If culinology were a science, then its pur-
pose would be mechanism elucidation, not applications. And
this is why the term “application of sciences” should be pre-
ferred over “applied sciences,” and application of sciences means
technology.
Finally, it should be said that, because we were not sufficiently
aware of these important differences, the program of molecu-
lar gastronomy was somewhat flawed when it was begun in the
1980s. The initial objectives of molecular gastronomy (This 1995)
were: (i) investigate recipes; (ii) collect and test culinary proverbs,
old wives’ tales, and so on; (iii) invent new dishes based on (i)
and (ii); (iv) introduce new tools, ingredients, and methods in the
kitchen; (v) use cooking to show that the physical and biological
sciences are wonderful. This was a major mistake because ob-
jectives (iii) and (iv) are technological, not scientific, and (v) is
political. This is why the objectives were recently changed. We
observed that a dish is considered good when it is “technically”
successful (a defective mayonnaise is a failure), when a flavor
pleases the consumer it is considered “art,” and when a prepared
dish is not brusquely “thrown” at a consumer, “love” and affection
must have been involved. This means that science should inves-
tigate the love component, the art component, and the technical
component. As all recipes are composed of 3 parts (the “techni-
cally useless” details, the “definitions,” and the “culinary precise
measurements”), molecular gastronomy should study all these
components, but, again, only from a scientific point of view (This
2005).
A foundation created in France with a network of
seminars and regional centers
Now, finally, let’s examine the question asked by the Editor of
this journal: why the creation of the Foundation for Food Sci-
ence and Food Culture? Since 1988, many activities have devel-
oped, in France and in other countries, around molecular gas-
tronomy. Since 1992, international workshops have been held in
Erice (Sicily, Italy). Since 1995, a molecular gastronomy team has
been working in a laboratory of the Collège de France, in Paris.
Since 1998, congresses on molecular gastronomy have been held
in France, mainly for young university teaching personnel. Since
50 COMPREHENSIVE REVIEWS IN FOOD SCIENCE AND FOOD SAFETY—Vol. 5, 2006
2000, monthly seminars on molecular gastronomy have been or-
ganized by INRA, with reports sent through e-mail to more than
1300 recipients around the world; “sister seminars” have by now
been created in Argentina, Belgium, Switzerland, The Nether-
lands, Denmark, Japan, and the United States of America (at the
Institute of Culinary Education). Since 2001, the Ateliers exper-
imentaux du goût, based on molecular gastronomy, have been
sponsored in French schools; these Ateliers have now also been
implemented in Greece, Italy, Spain, and Germany. Since 2002,
university courses on molecular gastronomy have been offered in
several countries (such as France, Italy, Denmark, and the United
Kingdom). In 2004, public and free courses on molecular gas-
tronomy were introduced in Paris.
Clearly some coherence had to be given to all these enter-
prises, and molecular gastronomy had to be put into a broader
frame, with anticipated synergistic effects. The question was, if
molecular gastronomy can have technological and educational
applications, why not organize it rationally? This is the aim of
the new foundation, providing a total and unified environment
for research, action, and communication. The Foundation is or-
ganized as would be found in institutions of higher education:
there are divisions (research, technology, art, education, safety,
regulations, communication), and there will be active outreach
through regional programs. The first program was launched in Ar-
bois (Franche Comté, near Jura, France) on April 12, 2006, under
the auspices of the French Academy of Sciences; it included a
lecture and prizes were given to young food technologists. Other
regions are preparing different programs, in France and in other
countries. One particular objective is not to foster competition
between regions but to promote complementarity based on par-
ticular regional strengths. The overall objective is to bring science
to where it is supposed to be: near every citizen!
References
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CRDP. 2005. Ateliers expérimentaux du goût: A propos des fiches d’Hervé This. Available
from: http://crdp.ac-paris.fr/index.htm?url=d arts-culture/gout-intro.htm
ECIS. 2002. Molecular gastronomy, presented at the 16. Conference of the European Colloid
and Interface Society (ECIS), Paris, September 26, 2002.
Le chocolat Chantilly. December 1996. Pour la Science 230:20.
This H. 1995. La gastronomie moleculaire et physique. Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. Paris VI,
France.
This H. 2002. Molecular gastronomy. Angewandte Chemie (International Edition) 41(1):83–8.
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