From World Wide Words this morning.....
"Food for thought On 7 June, New Scientist introduced me to a intriguing new way of making food: note-by-note cooking. Its a lineal descendant of the well-established molecular gastronomy, in which chefs use a wide variety of specialist techniques to produce exotic and weird transformations in ingredients. The new method does away with traditional sources of food altogether by using chemical reactions to produce dishes from their constituent chemical sources, garnished with flavouring substances such as furanthiol, borneol, verbenone, and methional. In part, the idea is to make dishes that cant be created from traditional ingredients. It may one day be possible to create products from plants that are indistinguishable from meat; this will help to resolve ecological and ethical problems associated with current agricultural methods. At the moment, note-by-note cooking is an experiment, though its originators, including the pioneer of molecular gastronomy, French chemist Hervé This, are entirely serious. If followed through, it might make that staple of Star Trek, the food replicator, into a practical device."
No seasonality; no growing sense of ripening, no harvest flurry and no need for the careful husbandry and storage.
I'm vegetarian; I don't want to eat something pretending to be meat, and I'm pretty sure most meat eaters don't either, and I want real fruit, real vegetables, real seeds and grains and nuts.
I suppose the technology would be useful in some situations, but it's really the thin end of a very large and big business benefiting, wedge.
atb,
M
"Food for thought On 7 June, New Scientist introduced me to a intriguing new way of making food: note-by-note cooking. Its a lineal descendant of the well-established molecular gastronomy, in which chefs use a wide variety of specialist techniques to produce exotic and weird transformations in ingredients. The new method does away with traditional sources of food altogether by using chemical reactions to produce dishes from their constituent chemical sources, garnished with flavouring substances such as furanthiol, borneol, verbenone, and methional. In part, the idea is to make dishes that cant be created from traditional ingredients. It may one day be possible to create products from plants that are indistinguishable from meat; this will help to resolve ecological and ethical problems associated with current agricultural methods. At the moment, note-by-note cooking is an experiment, though its originators, including the pioneer of molecular gastronomy, French chemist Hervé This, are entirely serious. If followed through, it might make that staple of Star Trek, the food replicator, into a practical device."
No seasonality; no growing sense of ripening, no harvest flurry and no need for the careful husbandry and storage.
I'm vegetarian; I don't want to eat something pretending to be meat, and I'm pretty sure most meat eaters don't either, and I want real fruit, real vegetables, real seeds and grains and nuts.
I suppose the technology would be useful in some situations, but it's really the thin end of a very large and big business benefiting, wedge.
atb,
M