The future of food: Step-by-step

He steps to the stage like a rock star. All the young chefs are on foot applauding. All the young chefs are on foot applauding. He is a hero. Hervé This is a hero for all chefs worldwide and he is not even a chef himself. As the keynote speaker at the World Association of Chefs Societies (WACS) Conference held in Thessaloniki, Greece, he takes over not only the stage, but also the hearts of chefs with his challenging speech. He will be repeating this sentence over and over again: I'm not a chef! Though he stresses this fact, I believe he is a true chef. If being a chef is about creating a dish, about creating an idea about food, thinking about the future of food and about how the planet will feed itself in the future, he is the ultimate chef!

This is physical chemist who works for the Institut National de la Recherce Agronomique at AgroParisTech, in Paris, France, a public institute dedicated to research of agricultural science. Apparently even the institute is not directly related to the culinary arts, but rather agricultural science. So how did he ever get to be the hero of chefs? Well, he coined the term "molecular and physical gastronomy" in 1988 with the late Nicholas Kurti, a Hungarian-born physicist whose hobby was cooking. Kurti was very enthusiastic about applying science to cooking and solving culinary problems with the aid of science. He also liked to play with the newly developed microwave. Back in 1969 at his talk in the Royal Society in London, he amazed the audience with his experimental reverse baked Alaska named frozen Florida, hot inside and cold outside, made in a microwave of course. Over the years he organized several workshops in Italy playing with the idea of molecular and physical aspects of gastronomy. After Kurti's death in 1998,...