page_title: Molecular gastronomy
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Molecular gastronomy / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Heston Blumenthal at Taste Of London Festival, June 2010.
context_page_description: Molecular gastronomy is a subdiscipline of food science that seeks to investigate the physical and chemical transformations of ingredients that occur in cooking. Its program includes three areas, as cooking was recognized to have three components: social, artistic, and technical. Molecular cuisine is a modern style of cooking, and takes advantage of many technical innovations from the scientific disciplines.
  The term "Molecular and Physical Gastronomy" was coined in 1988 by late Oxford physicist Nicholas Kurti and the French INRA chemist Hervé This. Some chefs associated with the term choose to reject its use.
context_section_description: There are many branches of food science that study different aspects of food, such as safety, microbiology, preservation, chemistry, engineering and physics. Until the advent of molecular gastronomy, there was no branch dedicated to studying the chemical processes of cooking in the home and in restaurants. Food science has primarily been concerned with industrial food production and, while the disciplines may overlap, they are considered separate areas of investigation.
  The creation of the discipline of molecular gastronomy was intended to bring together what had previously been fragmented and isolated investigations into the chemical and physical processes of cooking into an organized discipline within food science, to address what the other disciplines within food science either do not cover, or cover in a manner intended for scientists rather than cooks.
  The term "molecular and physical gastronomy" was coined in 1988 by Hungarian physicist Nicholas Kurti and French physical chemist Hervé This. In 1992, it became the title for a set of workshops held in Erice, Italy (originally titled "Science and Gastronomy") that brought together scientists and professional cooks for discussions about the science behind traditional cooking preparations. Eventually, the shortened term "molecular gastronomy" became the name of the approach, based on exploring the science behind traditional cooking methods.
  Kurti and This considered the creation of a formal discipline around the subjects discussed in the meetings. After Kurti's death in 1998, the name of the Erice workshops were changed by This to "The International Workshop on Molecular Gastronomy 'N. Kurti'". This remained the sole director of the subsequent workshops from 1999, and continued his research in the field of molecular gastronomy at the Inra-AgroParisTech International Centre for Molecular Gastronomy, remaining in charge of organizing the international meetings.
caption: Heston Blumenthal dislikes the term 'molecular gastronomy', believing it makes the practice sound "complicated" and "elitist."[9]
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