A biophysicist in the kitchen

It often happens that, when someone knows of my profession as a biophysicist and of my main domestic chore, that is, cooking, I am asked: “But, how do you cook?” I invariably detect an edge of suspicion in that question. What most of them ache to ask is: “Do you put chemistry into your cooking?” When, after a few polite exchanges, they confess to their poorly concealed real question, my reply is: “No, I don’t put any chemistry into my cooking; cooking is chemistry and mostly biophysical chemistry at that.” This is the main message of this paper, namely that it is a good time for vitalism to die, that there is no real difference between the chemical, biological and culinary processes, and that gastrophysics may help everybody to eat better.Science and cuisine are two activities which are often presented as opposing each other; cuisine would be a handcraft, kept as remote as possible from the ever-suspicious activities carried out by mad, if not venal, scientists in their laboratories. Grandma’s food will always be superior to any of the new concoctions. Needless to say this is a pure mirage, owing to the fantastic ability of the human mind to suppress negative aspects of our memories. In a world of no electric fridges, slow transport, very short seasons for most vegetables, when food took away a much larger fraction of family incomes than now, it is difficult to explain how food was so much better. In the absence of any ‘time machine’ experiment to take us back there, it is enough to use our memory in a more objective manner to find out that we eat, qualitatively and quantitatively, far better than our forefathers (albeit we do it in excess, but that is another problem).Yet the nostalgia of an inexistent past fuels most of the food business today. The greengrocer will offer us ‘biologically grown’ lettuces, the butcher will tell us that this particular veal was fed ‘naturally’ and the wine supplier will boast, in all honesty, of a wine made ‘without any chemistry’. I