Okay, nobody panic. Everything's going to be all right. How do I know? Because Harold McGee says he's going to write an "occasional column" for the New York Times.
If you care about food and why it tastes the way it does, you should know McGee. His book On Food and Cooking is an amazing compendium of food science - the single-page chart of every kind of cheese in the world and how it's made is worth the price alone. Want to know what some of the chemical compounds in wine are? In there. Why espresso has that lovely brown crema on top? In there. My wife keeps her copy next to the bed.
I interviewed McGee a few weeks ago. He was gracious and smart, and as an aside to one of my questions he pointed out that, before human beings invented cooking, no living thing had ever tasted caramel or anything distilled. To McGee, it was a throwaway line. It kind of blew my mind.
Geeks are increasingly bringing mad skillz to bear in the kitchen. In the haute cuisine world it's a trend called (sometimes derisively) "molecular gastronomy." Here's a story my colleague Mark McClusky wrote about the Chicago restaurant Alinea and it's high-tech chef Grant Achatz. London has Fat Duck and Heston Blumenthal, and Spain's Mediterranean coast has El Bulli and chef Ferran Adria. I've been to Alinea, and it was amazing -- not just because it was like eating on the USS Enterprise (from the sliding doors at the entry to the weird utensils) but because the act of eating was actually joyful. When you are mindful of mechanisms and ingredients and observant of moment-by-moment variations in the world -- in other words, when you do science -- everything gets more fun. Even eating.
