A BRIEF HISTORY OF CULINARY MOVEMENTS

Over the last half century or so there have been a couple of major culinary movements that have left their indelible mark on the way in which we think about food today. The first of these was Nouvelle Cuisine which emerged in France during the 1960s. In the early 1990s, molecular gastronomy arrived with a bang (often literally). Let’s take a brief look at these movements in order to get a better sense of the culinary landscape in which we find ourselves today.

“Periods of gastronomic change are inevitably periods of gastronomic controversy. When there is no controversy, there is no inventiveness, because controversy of course doesn’t appear if there is no tension between tradition and innovation, or the other way, between innovation and academic conventions.” (Revel 1985, on the introduction of the Nouvelle Cuisine)

Nouvelle Cuisine

The term itself dates from the 1730s–1740s when French writers used it to describe a break with the traditional way of cooking and presenting foods (Hyman and Hyman 1999). However, the culinary movement that now bears the name really took on a life of its own in the 1960s when the French food critics Christian Millau and Henri Gault used the term to describe the new culinary style that was then just starting tomake its appearance in the kitchens of some of France’s top chefs.

Nowadays, the term nouvelle cuisine is used to refer to the use of seasonal ingredients with a focus on natural flavours, light textures (e.g. sauces that have not been thickened by the addition of flour and fat) together with a visual aesthetic that focuses on a presentation that is both simple and elegant. The French chefs who were instrumental in developing this new type of cuisine, including Paul Bocuse and Jean and Pierre Troisgros, were undoubtedly influenced by the minimalist Japanese style that placed a value on serving smaller portions. Indeed, the opening of the first French culinary school in Japan in 1960 by chef Shizuo Tsuji resulted in a much greater cultural exchange between Japanese and leading French chefs, including Paul Bocuse and Alain Chapel. The latter also embraced the use of ingredients sourced from many different parts of the world. In fact, this is also why it was so natural for nouvelle cuisine to morph seamlessly into ‘fusion’ food.

“Really, the concern with how the food looked can be traced back to the emergence of nouvelle cuisine. The pictures of these dishes have set themselves in the mind of the public. Nouvelle cuisine was essentially photogenic …Think of the glorious coloured photographs of these dishes, which have become eponymous with the purveying of recipes.” (Halligan 1990, p. 121)

It was precisely this emphasis on the visual appearance of food that led Alexander Cockburn, in a 1977 article that appeared in the New York Review of Books, to introduce the term ‘gastroporn’. This term, which has now made it into the Collins English Dictionary, is defined as ‘the representation of food in a highly sensual manner’. It should therefore be noted that even food writing can qualify for this epithet.

The rise of molecular gastronomy

There can be no doubt that the fusion of the physical sciences with culinary artistry has fundamentally changed the fine dining landscape over the last couple of decades or so (Belasco 2006; Roosth 2013) and has been enthusiastically covered in the press under the title of ‘molecular gastronomy’. This revolutionary new approach to cuisine is one that has attracted a phenomenal amount of media interest from pretty much every corner of the developed world (see Barham et al. 2010). The term itself was first coined by the Oxford-based Hungarian physicist Nicholas Kurti (who back in 1969 gave a presentation at the Royal Institute in London entitled The Physicist in the Kitchen; see Kurti 1969; Kurti and Kurti 1988). Particularly influential here was also a paper that Kurti wrote together with the French physical chemist Hervé This in the popular science magazine Scientific American (Kurti and This-Benckhard 1994a, b).

But what exactly is molecular gastronomy? McGee (1984) talks in terms of “the scientific study of deliciousness”. Perhaps a more precise, albeit less grammatical, definition comes from Roosth (2013, p. 4) who describes it as “a food movement whose practitioners – chemists who study food and chefs who apply their results – define [sic] as the application of the scientific method and laboratory apparatuses [sic] to further cooking.”

Nowadays, there is certainly a bewildering array of new techniques and ingredients, some natural, others much more artificial/processed, available to the budding modernist chef, no matter whether operating in the restaurant or home environment (e.g. see Blumenthal 2008; Myhrvold and Young 2011; Youssef 2013). Harold McGee, the brilliant North American author on kitchen science, has written a number of influential books in which he explores the science underpinning the practice of molecular gastronomy (McGee 1984; 1990). There he investigates such things as culinary proverbs, sayings and old wives’ tales. He has done more than perhaps anyone else to explore the physics and chemistry that lie behind a host of everyday culinary phenomena such as, for example, the Maillard reaction (McGee 1990).

Named after the French doctor Louis-Camille Maillard who “discovered that when amino acids are heated in the company of sugar, the reaction produces hundreds of new molecules that give cooked food its characteristic color and much of its smell.” (Pollan 2013, p. 88).

Fortunately for us there are already many great chefs and eminent scientists, not to mention flavour houses, working on the physics and chemistry of flavour (e.g. Barham 2000; Alícia and elBullitaller 2006; Konings 2009; Barham et al. 2010; Chartier 2012; Humphries 2012). We are therefore not going to cover these aspects of molecular gastronomy in any detail in this book (see McGee 1990; This 2005, 2012, 2013, for detailed coverage of this theme). We will, however, be taking a closer look at some of the most intriguing dishes to have emerged from these modernist kitchens over the last couple of decades. We will discuss some of the legendary dishes from the elBulli restaurant in Spain and The FatDuck in Bray (UK).We’re going to dissect a number of the dishes from the Chicago School of Restaurants; think Grant Achatz’s Alinea and Homaro Cantu’s Moto.We’ll also be taking a look at a few of the dishes championed by those innovative new restaurants that have sprung up across Spain in recent years (part of la nueva cocina movement; Lubow 2003; Steinberger 2010).

However, our interest in discussing many of these amazing dishes will not be the culinary magic underlying the preparation of the ingredients on the plate, but rather to try and understand some of the key psychological and neuroscientific principles that lie behind the wonderful experience of eating them. And having got a handle on these fundamental insights, the challenge will then be to demonstrate how they can be used in everyday life, for example, to provide tips to help any one of us eat a little more healthily without having to compromise on the sensory pleasure of the experience.

Molecular gastronomy or modernist cuisine?

A number of the chefs with whom we collaborate most closely have something of a love/hate relationship with the term ‘molecular gastronomy’ (e.g. Blumenthal and McGee 2006; McGee 2006; Rayner 2006; Blumenthal 2008;Gopnik 2011). In fact, many of those working in the field would much rather have you refer to what they do as ‘modernist cuisine’. There are a number of reasons behind this terminological debate that are perhaps worth mentioning here. First, many chefs object to the term ‘molecular gastronomy’ because they feel that what has been happening in the kitchen in recent years is about so much more than merely playing with molecules, films, foams (or espumas as the Spanish like to call them) and gels, etc. In the pages that follow, you’ll see this is a view with which we most wholeheartedly agree.

What is more, many of those working in this area are also sensitive to the criticism that what they deliver can be seen as nothing more than a form of elitist cuisine. This notion, at least to those who worry about such things, is strengthened by the term ‘gastronomy’. As Heston Blumenthal put it in an interview back in 2006:

“Molecular makes it sound complicated ... and gastronomy makes it sound elitist... We may use modern thickeners, sugar substitutes, enzymes, liquid nitrogen, sous vide, dehydration and other non-traditional means but these do not define our cooking. They are a few of the many tools that we are fortunate to have available as we strive to make delicious and stimulating dishes” (Rayner 2006)

The preference among many of those practitioners working in the kitchen is therefore for the more inclusive and less overtly chemical label of ‘modernist cuisine’.

What with so much baggage associated with the term ‘molecular gastronomy’, it should perhaps come as little surprise that Myhrvold and Young (2011), in what The Independent newspaper described as “the most spectacular cookbook the world has ever seen” (Walsh 2011, p. 11), chose to title their 3000-page masterpiece Modernist Cuisine. This 5-volume shelf-filler is undoubtedly a veritable feast for the eyes, detailing with absolutely stunning photography pretty much every tool and technique of the new art and science of the table (those with an addiction to gastroporn take note). That said, ‘molecular gastronomy’ would appear to be the term that has stuck in the public consciousness. Indeed, a quick search on Google Scholar on 24 August 2013 brought up 1080 hits for the term ‘molecular gastronomy’ as compared to just 123 for ‘modernist cuisine’. Furthermore, many other up-and-coming young chefs such as Josef Youssef (who like many others trained for a while in the kitchens of The Fat Duck) appear to have no qualms about using the term ‘molecular’ (as Youssef himself does in the title for his new book; see Youssef 2013).

Deciding on the right name for this global culinary movement would seem to be a debate that is going to run and run. As such, we trust that you will forgive us for using the two terms fairly interchangeably in this book, although we also acknowledge the fact that ‘molecular gastronomy’ fails to capture many of the most important innovations that have permeated the research kitchens of some of the world’s top restaurants over the last few years (see also McGee 2006; Schira 2011).

What is more, Hervé This – one of the scientists credited with coining the term ‘molecular gastronomy’ – has already pronounced the movement dead (see Ashley 2013)! For This (2012), the future is all about note-by-note cuisine, which he defines as: “a culinary trend in which no plant (vegetables, fruits) or animal (meat, fish) tissues are used, because these traditional food ingredients are mixtures of compounds giving poor control to the cook. Instead, note-by-note cuisine makes use of “pure” compounds in order to build all aspects of dishes: taste, odor, color, texture, and so on.” (This 2012, p. 243). Sounds tasty?


In the pages of this book, we will repeatedly see how many of the most interesting things that have been going on recently in the world’s top restaurants are about so much more than merely innovative food chemistry (especially in the area of novel gelling agents such as methylcellulose, xanthan gum and alginate) and kitchen technology (here we are thinking of devices such as the RotoVap, Pacojet, Thermomix and Gastrovac). Rather, the table of the future will likely involve the delivery of marketable (and hence branded) multisensory dining experiences: experiences that are as much about theatrical performance, entertainment and, increasingly, interaction as they are about the delivery of nutritious and filling food to the hungry and soon-to-be rather poorer diner (Berghaus 2001). In addition, as far as we can tell, technology is also going to be an ubiquitous feature of our fine (and possibly also home) dining in the years to come.

“They work on extracting the essence of the ingredient, and they play with the sense and textures,” Remolina says. “All the senses are involved. Now food is a show.” (Park 2013 interviewing Remolina)

Of course, not everyone is convinced by the turn that so many top-end dining experiences are taking (e.g. Gill 2007; Poole 2012). And that’s fine too (to be expected, even; see the earlier quote from Revel). As we hope to show in this book, even if you plan never to set foot in a modernist restaurant, there are still insights to be gained from studying the food that is being served in such venues nowadays – insights that can be applied no matter your favourite food or style of cuisine. Even the slowest of slow food (see Petrini 2007) still has to be served somewhere, and will most likely be eaten with the aid of some sort of cutlery. It is crucial to remember, then, that the atmosphere affects what we think about the food no matter where we happen to be or what we happen to be eating (slow food or modernist cuisine).

The same applies when we start to think about the cutlery, the company and even the naming of the dishes that we order. The key point to note here is that while our growing understanding of the new sciences of the table may well be best advanced by looking at what is being served at the top modernist restaurants, the insights that will be uncovered there can hopefully be applied wherever we happen to eat and no matter what we happen to be eating.

On the rise of the celebrity chef

While nouvelle cuisine and molecular gastronomy have swept the world stage, another profound change in the balance of power within the restaurant sector has also taken place. Traditionally, all of the activity in a fancy restaurant would revolve around the front of house. Just think back to the time when the omnipotent restaurateur would meet and greet his guests by name as they arrived, wielding the power to decide who would get to sit at the best tables (Steinberger 2010). Meanwhile, the anonymous chef would normally keep a low profile out back doing exactly as he or she was told. In fact, should the chef in one of these restaurants change, the diner might well not know about it; even if they did, they likely wouldn’t care too much. However, the last couple of decades have seen a fundamental shift of power from the front of house to the back (which is no longer always to be found out back).

The rise of the glass-screened kitchen, which has become such a signature feature of so many restaurants nowadays, can be seen as an architectural acknowledgement of this transition. For those who have had the opportunity to dine there, think of the glass-screened kitchen that forms the centrepiece of Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner restaurant in theMandarin Oriental Hotel in London. There is simply no way that the diner can get to their table without catching an eyeful of the action taking place in the kitchen (including all of those pineapples slowly spit-roasting). It is certainly hard to imagine that there has ever been a time previously when anyone would have thought it worthwhile to beam the action live from the kitchen direct to the diners’ table (as Daniel Facen now does in his Italian restaurant; see Schira 2011). And never before has the celebrity chef been guaranteed to pack out stadium after stadium (as happened to Heston Blumenthal during his recent tour of Australia) while talking about and demonstrating the latest culinary creations from their kitchens.

The search for novelty and surprise

Before taking a look at the relevant science underlying the field of gastrophysics, it is perhaps worth dwelling for a moment on the search for novelty that is such a signature feature of so much of contemporary cuisine (and that includes, obviously, nouvelle cuisine but also modernist cuisine). This search very often seems as if it were a recent phenomenon. However, Beaugé (2012) makes the case that diners have actually been interested in all that is new for well over a century now.As proof, just take the following: “It is an exceedingly common mania among people of inordinate wealth to exact incessantly new or so-called new dishes … Novelty! It is the prevailing cry; it is imperiously demanded by everyone.... What feats of ingenuity have we not been forced to perform, at times, in order to meet our customer’s wishes? Personally, I have ceased counting the nights spent in the attempt to discover new combinations.” While this might well sound like something that came from the keyboard of one of today’s overworked celebrity chefs, the words were actually penned more than a century ago by Auguste Escoffier, head cook of the Paris Ritz and London Savoy (Escoffier 1907, p. vii).

The key point, then, is that we shouldn’t think of the search for novelty as being a late twentieth century phenomenon. The desire, at least at the top end of cuisine, has been with us for a very long time. That said, an argument can be made that there probably hasn’t been a time previously when the appetite for anything and everything newwas quite as strong as it is today, nor found across such a broad section of the dining public. But where exactly does this overriding search for novelty, for the unusual, for the surprising and for the latest ‘new thing’ come from? According to Baumann (1996, pp. 116–121), contemporary dining can be seen in terms of the post-modern ‘consuming body’: the modernist diner as the receiver of sensations. In fact, in his book Life in Fragments, Baumann stresses how we currently live in a period of uncertainty: we live in a world where we are unsure if what we are getting is really the best of all possible sensations. The problem for the diner, then, is that it simply isn’t possible to measure those sensations and experiences objectively in order to know whether or not they really are the very best.

“Novel or strange edibles are no longer scorned but prized, dinner-party fare is judged according to its surprise value.” (MacClancy 1992, p. 209)

This uncertainty, then, leads the diner – and the modernist chef preparing the food for that diner – to search for the new products and improved food experiences that just might live up to the promise of delivering heightened sensory pleasures at the table (Baumann, 1996, pp. 116–117, as cited in Sutton, 2001, pp. 117-119). Notice here how novelty comes in many forms: from sourcing the most unusual and/or exotic of ingredients or outré vegetables from the very furthest corners of the globe (MacClancy 1992; Baumann 1996, p. 121; Sutton 2001; Bourdain 2002); from presenting familiar ingredients and flavours in formats that are entirely unfamiliar; or from the introduction of unusual new elements into the dining experience, be it technology at the dining table, dining-in-the-dark or the addition of elements of theatre or magic to the gastronomic proceedings.

We believe that the delivery of novel culinary experiences that diners find both satisfying and multisensorially stimulating is increasingly going to be facilitated by our rapidly growing knowledge about how the diner’s brain integrates the various sensory and conceptual elements in a dish, by understanding that taste and flavour resides in the mind (and not the mouth) and, of course, by taking this science to the table. As Gill (2007, p. 119) notes “...taste is something that happens in your head and not, as you might imagine, on your tongue.” Marion Halligan (1990, p. 209) makes a similar point: “Chefs, whose livelihood is others’ eating, know that the best food begins in the mind”... to which we would like to add that that is where the best food experiences end up as well!

At the same time, however, it is worth remembering that the search for novelty can have some unexpected consequences. Although we may be willing to try anything once (Abrahams 1984, p. 23), as least if we happen to be a neophile (Rozin 1999), much of contemporary cuisine cannot really be described as comfort food (Rayner 2008, p. 193; Stuckey 2012, p. 65). What is undoubtedly also the case is that culinary surprise never tastes as sweet the second time around. In fact, we may find ourselves in the bizarre position of having a truly wonderful meal at the hands of a modernist chef (who knows, perhaps even the perfect meal), while at the same time having absolutely no desire to want to repeat the experience ever again (cf. Stuckey 2012, on this theme). Take the following from a recent review of the London eatery Restaurant Story:

“Still, Sellers is a serious talent, and his achievement in launching a restaurant this fine at the age of 26 is worth celebrating. Like a good book, Restaurant Story left me feeling stimulated, satisfied and wanting to tell my friends about it. It also left me with a suspicion that, much as I’d enjoyed it, I would probably never need to return.” (MacLeod 2013)

The taste of expectation

Expectations are a key point when talking about novelty and surprise. It has been demonstrated that, generally speaking, we tend to like food and drink more if they meet our expectations than if they do not (see Peterson and Ross 1972; Pinson 1986; Lee et al. 2006; but see also Garber et al. 2000).Whenever we eat and drink in fact, even before we have taken the first mouthful, our brains will have made a prediction about the likely taste/flavour of that which we are about to ingest (Small 2012). They will also have made a judgment call about how much we are going to like the experience (this is known as hedonic expectancy; Cardello and Sawyer 1992;Woods et al. 2011). Note also that the appearance sets up expectations regarding the likely satiating properties of a food too, which can also impact on a diner’s subsequent feelings of satiety (Brunstrom and Wilkinson 2007; Brunstrom et al. 2010).

“A great deal of the pleasure of food is expectation.” (Gill 2011, p. 13)

Food scientists have demonstrated that when a food or beverage item fails to meet our expectations we are likely to evaluate it, both immediately and for a long time thereafter, more negatively than if our expectations had been met (e.g. Cardello 1994; Deliza and MacFie 1996; Schifferstein 2001; Raudenbush et al. 2002; Deliza et al. 2003; Zellner et al. 2004; Yeomans et al. 2008). It turns out that we may be especially sensitive to disconfirmed expectation when it comes to our experience of food and drink, since these are the stimuli that we actually take into our mouths (Koza et al. 2005). As such, we need to take special care to avoid the risk of poisoning.

Such findings are once again of fundamental importance to the modernist chef who may well be thinking about deliberately confounding his or her diners’ expectations. Take the following example to illustrate the point: when Heston Blumenthal and his colleagues served a savoury ice-cream that looked like sweet strawberry to unsuspecting diners in the setting of the laboratory, those who hadn’t been forewarned that it might be salty rather than sweet liked the dish far less both at the time and when tested several weeks thereafter than those who had been told (by the name of the dish) to expect a savoury flavour. In fact, simply giving the dish the name ‘Food 386’ helped to prepare diners for surprise, to expect the unexpected and so keep their mind open to new experiences. Just how many great-tasting dishes have been spoiled, one wonders, by the failure to get the name of the dish right.


“I watched the Blonde get her first course, a neat timbale of salmon hash, beet-cured salmon and sweet dill dressing (what’s beet-cured salmon, please?). Her pretty face was a picture of serene expectation. Then, a moment later, it was as if she were [sic] sitting still, but her head were [sic] travelling at Mach three.

She let out a small, strangulated mew and coughed: ‘Cat food.’ What, it’s like cat food? ‘No, it is cat food. It’s Rory Bremner beethinied salmon doing such a good impression of cat food, it’s uncanny’.” (Gill 2007, p. 108)

Of course, any self-respecting modernist chef wouldn’t climb very far up the international San Pellegrino rankings if they were to listen to advice such as ‘We really do think that you shouldn’t surprise your diners! Laboratory-based research unequivocally suggests that people just don’t like it.’ This is one of the key areas where the results of laboratory research differ from what happens in many Michelin-starred restaurants. Now, when it comes to surprising the diner (which often involves trying to disconfirm or confound their expectations), this is something that the modernist chef excels at (in a positive way). Indeed, to be surprised is something that many diners have now come to expect when dining at one of the modernist temples to haute cuisine (Rayner 2008). However, our enjoyment of surprise, especially when it comes to food and drink – that is, the stuff that goes into our mouths and that we may swallow and which, as was just mentioned, has the potential to poison us – is going to be very much context dependent.

While surprise can undoubtedly be a very enjoyable and exciting experience if the diner knows that they are safe in the hands of one of the growing number of culinary artists who has specifically designed the experience to be ‘just so’, it can be far less pleasant when dining at a friend’s house or if you find yourself taking part in a culinary experiment in the context of the research laboratory. Understanding the role of expectations in our dining experiences is therefore going to be absolutely crucial to approaching the perfect meal.

“Standing in Ferran Adrià’s kitchen at elBulli, it is easy to believe that you have slipped down the rabbit hole. Adrià, who would have been the caterer of choice for the Mad Hatter, invents food that provokes all the senses, including the sense of disbelief. His success is almost as amazing as his food.” (Lubow 2003)

Food as theatre: the multisensory experience economy meets cuisine

In this book, we are going to see how the new art of the table is increasingly as much about the theatre of the overall experience as it is about the taste of the food on the plate (in a way, building on Pine and Gilmore’s 1998, 1999 influential work on ‘the experience economy’; see also Kotler 1974; Hanefors and Mossberg 2003). At this point in history and for the foreseeable future, should we be lucky enough to stumble across it or search it out (as one of the growing number of food tourists; Boniface 2003; Hall et al. 2003; Rayner 2008), the perfect meal will likely involve some combination of great (and probably novel) culinary sensations together with a healthy dose of theatre/story-telling in what will be a truly immersive multisensory dining experience (Blumenthal 2013).

“It is food as theatre.” (Elizabeth Carter, Good Food Guide editor, cited in BBC News story ‘Fat Duck wins award despite scare’)

The brain on flavour

At this stage in the proceedings, it should be clear that the perfect meal involves so much more than merely how the food on the plate tastes. As such, it suddenly becomes clear that we need to draw on a whole new range of scientific disciplines/insights in order to really understand what is going on in the diner’s mind in response to the all-new multisensory experiences that they find themselves exposed to.

Now, it isn’t strictly true to say that scientists have not been studying the experience of flavour; they have. More often than not however, this study is carried out in a very basic way typically at the behest of one of the large food or drink companies (Meiselman 2013). The results that emerge from such research may well have been of interest to the company who wants to know how to reduce the salt in their breakfast cereal without the consumer detecting it (Stuckey 2012), or else answering a company’s queries about exactly how much fish meal you can feed a chicken before the average supermarket consumer will taste it in the breast meat. However, while such research is undoubtedly worthy, it fails to address many of the most pressing questions about how to deliver the most stimulating and memorable multisensory dining experiences with which we are concerned in this book. We are fortunate here that our understanding of how the brain experiences flavour have benefited greatly from the recent emergence of a new field of research that goes by the name of ‘neurogastronomy’.

Neurogastronomy

Neurogastronomy – the study of the complex brain processes that give rise to the flavours that we all experience when eating or drinking – really emerged as a scientific discipline in the first years of the twenty-first century. The term itself was first coined by Gordon Shepherd, a distinguished professor at Yale School of Medicine (Shepherd 2006, 2012). We certainly believe that a number of the studies that have investigated which parts of the brain light up when a participant, lying in the brain scanner, is fed something or other (often some liquid or purified foodstuff delivered by means of a tube inserted into their mouth) have generated some fascinating results (e.g. St-Onge et al. 2005). Neuroimaging studies have, for example, enabled researchers to understand why exactly it is that people think that a drink tastes better when they have been told that it costs more (Plassman et al. 2008; Spence 2010). They have also highlighted the way in which different brands of soft drink (e.g. Coke vs Pepsi) can end up recruiting different brain networks (McClure et al. 2004; see also Kühn and Gallinat 2013).

Neuroimaging has also been used to investigate whether wine experts use more of their brain when tasting than the rest of us do; the answer, it turns out, depends on which study you read (Castriota-Scanderbeg et al. 2005; Pazart et al. 2011). Furthermore, surprising though it may seem, more of our brain lights up when we merely think about (or anticipate) food than when we actually get to taste it (O’Doherty et al. 2002; see also Pelchat et al. 2004). Researchers have even started to delve into the question of which parts of the brain become more active when we decide whether or not we would like to taste a particular novel combination of ingredients (i.e. something that we have never eaten or come across before; Van der Laan et al. 2011; Barron et al. 2013).

For example, do you think that you would like the taste of a raspberry and avocado smoothie? Or how about a green tea jelly, or beetroot custard? Only future research will tell whether today’s modernist chefs exhibit increased neural activation in areas such as the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that have been shown to light up when we perform such a task, given all the practice they have undoubtedly had in terms of imagining weird and wonderful combinations of ingredients with which to assault their diners’ senses (Maguire et al. 2000).

It turns out that food really is one of the most effective stimuli in terms of modulating brain activity. This is especially true if we happen to be hungry. For example, in one neuroimaging study, a 24% increase in whole brain metabolism was observed when a group of hungry participants were shown, and allowed to smell, their favourite foods (e.g. a bacon, egg, cheese sandwich or cinnamon buns; see Wang et al. 2004). This is a massive change in brain activity in what is by far the body’s most blood-thirsty organ (e.g. Wrangham 2010; Allen 2012), especially when compared to the 1–2% signal changes that are typically reported in the literature.

“... on a day-to-day basis, from the moment we are born until the moment we die, there is nothing that concerns us more than food.” (Allen 2012, p. 180)

At this point, we can only speculate as to whether there might be a link between the profound neural and physiological changes that can be triggered when a person looks at (and/or smells) an appetizing plate of food and the recent growth of gastroporn. Indeed, the growing importance of the visual appearance of food, a trend that as we have seen already was really promoted by the emergence of the nouvelle cuisine movement, seems to make perfect sense once it is realized that ‘eye appeal’ really is half the meal (or as Apicius, the first century Roman gourmet is purported to have said: “The first taste is always with the eyes”). Given just how important the sight of food is, we are clearly going to need to learn as much as we can about the visual aesthetics of plating.

In fact, one of the most fascinating examples of the way in which our brain controls our food behaviours actually comes not from neuroimaging research but rather from neuropsychology (that is, from the study of patients suffering from brain damage). Take the bizarre case of those patients afflicted by Gourmand Syndrome (Regard and Landis 1997; Steingarten 2002). This is a rare neurological condition in which a stroke (one that typically affects the insula) results in an individual suddenly acquiring a profound and all-consuming interest in fine food! This can sometimes happen to those who previously expressed no interest in food whatsoever (i.e. those would eat to live rather than vice versa). Seemingly overnight, these patients develop an overriding passion for fine gastronomic cuisine. Such curious examples left Jeffrey Steingarten (2002), the famous North American food critic, to ponder:

“With nearly every bite I take, in the back of my mind there looms the same nagging question: Who is having all the fun? Is it my brain or is it really me?”

Do neurogastronomists make great-tasting food?

Given the importance of the brain to multisensory flavour perception, one question that would likely spring to mind here is whether you are likely to have your perfect meal while sitting in a restaurant serviced by a chef practicing neurogastronomy. This is no longer a purely hypothetical question. For while he may not have come up with the term, the credit for first combining culinary science with brain science should probably go to Miguel Sánchez Romera, a friend of Ferran Adrià. For a while, Sánchez Romera combined two careers, one as a neurologist by day and the other as a practicing chef by night. Somehow, he even found time to write the intriguing book La Cocina de los Sentidos in which he combines his two passions (Sánchez Romera 2003). He eventually closed his Spanish restaurant situated close to Barcelona, L’Esguard de Sant Andreu de Llavaneres, and moved to New York City’s Chelsea district to open another one named Romera (McLaughlin 2011). Miraculously, it looks like the restaurant has managed to survive the excoriating review it received from Frank Bruni in The New York Times (Bruni 2011).

“Its chef, Miguel Sánchez Romera, is a doctor who worked for years as a neurologist. He has coined a whole new genre for his cooking, which favors squishy textures, kaleidoscopic mosaics of vegetable powders, and a wedding’s worth of edible flowers. He calls it neurogastronomy, which “embodies a holistic approach to food by means of a thoughtful study of the organoleptic properties of each ingredient,” or so says the restaurant’s Web site. Organoleptic means ’perceived by a sense organ’. I looked it up.” (Frank Bruni on Romero, one of the world’s first neurogastronomy restaurants in Chelsea, New York City; Bruni 2011)

Of course, it is unlikely that the neurogastronomy movement will lose momentum simply because of the activities of any one of its practitioners (or because of a negative review, no matter how bad it might be). We would, however, argue that this example helps to illustrate the more fundamental point that neurogastronomy –understanding the brain on flavour – provides insights about only a small part of what makes a wonderful meal truly great. It should always be remembered that sticking people into the noisy claustrophobic coffin that is the contemporary functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner is a most unnatural activity. And when itcomes to the study of flavour, things rapidly get much worse (see Spence 2012a). To get a sense of the gulf that separates neurogastronomy research from the real world of dining experiences that we are trying to understand in this book, just imagine yourself lying with your head clamped absolutely still. You have a tube inserted into your mouth pumping in who knows what liquid or puréed concoction as you lie flat on your back. Worse still, each squirt of real flavour is typically washed down with a gob of artificial saliva. (OK, that may not be what the scientists conducting these studies call it, but that is essentially what it is – the most neutral of mouth washes!)

Can such research really provide useful insights about the organization of the flavour perceptual system in the human brain? Absolutely! Just see Small (2012) for a summary of the current state of the art in this regard. That said, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the situation of the isolated participant being scanned in a noisy neuroimaging machine in a science faculty is very far removed from the social interaction of eating a great meal in a wonderful location surrounded by your close friends. As in so many other areas, one needs to be cautious about the ‘neuromania’ (the term coined by Legrenzi and Umiltà 2011) that has swept the cognitive neurosciences (and many other fields of research) in recent years.

As the results reviewed above have shown, research in the field of neurogastronomy is really starting to help researchers understand a little more about the fundamentally important role of food in the organization and responsiveness of the human brain. However, while knowing more about how the brain processes flavour is one thing; understanding the key factors contributing to the perfect meal is quite another.With that clearly in mind, let us then move on to look at the other new sciences of the table that will make their appearance in the pages ahead.

Food and the perception of everything else

How much of our pleasure in savouring a great meal resides in the quality, freshness and seasonality of the ingredients and how they have been prepared, and how much depends on ‘the everything else’, that is, the tablecloths, the feel of the cutlery, the name of the dish and the atmosphere and ambiance? This is a debate that we have had with a number of chefs. Every one of us, whether a chef, a diner or even a food critic, likes to think that we can taste the quality of the food. That is, we all (and this includes experimental psychologists and budding gastrophysicists alike) believe that we can evaluate the merits of a food or dish and ignore the ‘everything else’. However, a very large body of empirical evidence suggests that this is simply an illusion: a convincing one, granted, but an illusion nonetheless.

In fact, the field of experimental psychology research is filled with exposing just such misperceptions that permeate so many aspects of our daily lives (e.g. Chabris and Simons 2011; Kahneman 2011). Certainly, when the scientists investigate what happens to people’s ratings of food and drink when they change the colour of the plate, the ambient lighting, the music, the cutlery, etc., they often find that those ratings change significantly. This is not only true for the sensory-discriminative qualities of what a diner happens to be eating (e.g. what it tastes of and how intense the flavour is), but also for their hedonic responses (i.e. how much do they like the experience). But when you ask people do you think that the colour of the plate or the weight of the cutlery had any influence on your experience of the dish, we all say “Of course not. Are you crazy?”

“How much of our enjoyment of a great meal originates in the food and drink itself and how much comes from the ‘everything else’?” is a question that we are frequently asked by journalists hungry for a figure or better still a percentage to put in their columns. Now the serious scientist is loath to provide such a number; it obviously depends on so many different factors (and whatever number you give, you will undoubtedly be criticized by your academic colleagues for having simplified matters too much or for having failed to consider some or other factor or issue). Nevertheless, when you combine all of the evidence outlined in the pages that follow, it’s hard not to come away from the research convinced that a ‘good half’ of our experience of food and drink is determined by the ‘everything else’. We are going to come across a lot of research showing how pretty much every conceivable factor can make a difference to the way in which we perceive, respond to and remember food (and drink).

Of course, the food itself is absolutely critical. No one can argue with the claim that sourcing the best, the freshest and the most flavourful ingredients and having the culinary skills to allow those components to show their full potential and to harmonize them with whatever else happens to be on the plate is going to be a necessary precondition for the perfect meal. However, if that wonderful food is served up at 35,000 ft in an airplane or in a grotty work canteen, it simply will not taste the same.

We can’t deny that the claim that so much of the experience of a great meal depends on the ‘everything else’ comes as anathema to many of the chefs we work with. In fact, we have known some of them to get more than a little agitated when we start to talk to them about how important the ‘everything else’ really is.

Many chefs, especially those of a more traditional persuasion, will tell you that great food is nothing more than simply the freshest, tastiest of ingredients, skilfully prepared and beautifully presented. For many of them, there really is nothing else. Very often however, these are the very same chefs who have their restaurant situated in a converted knitting museum or who are happy to let the duty manager make the musical selection by blasting every diner in the restaurant with their own personal iPod selection. Others that we have spoken to start muttering something like “You mean that you can serve dog food, and people will like it if you just play the right music?”  the blood rushing to their faces. We honestly believe that that is unlikely to be the case (Chossat and Gergaud 2003). What we are really much more interested in is making sure that wonderful food is really shown at its best.

By Charles Spence & Betina Piqueras-Fiszman in "The Perfect Meal : The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining", John Wiley & Sons, UK, 2014, Excerpts pp. 2-17. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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