Of Foams and Formalisms: Scientific Expertise and Craft Practice in Molecular Gastronomy

This article reports on "molecular gastronomy," a food movement whose practitioners-chemists who study food and chefs who apply their results-define as the application of the scientific method and laboratory apparatuses to further cooking. Molecular gastronomy offers one example of how scientific rationales sometimes percolate outside professional scientific fields. I explore what happens when the explanatory ground occupied by "culture" is supplanted by a different mode of expertise-here, science. Following ethnographic research conducted in a molecular gastronomy laboratory, I show how French molecular gastronomists seek both to preserve and renovate classic French cuisine. Describing how they think about French cuisine in an anthropological language indebted to French structuralism-the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, in particular-I reflect on the afterlives of anthropological concepts in scientific domains.