May’s issue of Wired has an article by Mark McClusky called My Compliments to the Lab. It’s about high-tech haute cuisine (or “molecular gastronomy”), and it’s a well-written article. As a science geek, I find it pretty interesting, but as a food enthusiast, it makes me very sad.

To be upfront about my biases, I’m not a big fan of haute cuisine. I think much of it emphasizes presentation over flavor, and combines ingredients for the novelty value rather than actual taste. I love food that is steeped in history. I’m not opposed to innovation or fusion, but like Barbara Fisher of Tigers and Strawberries, I like fusion dishes to arise organically out of an understanding of the cultures and history involved, not just to be fusion for fusion’s sake. Similarly, good presentation is lovely and can enhance food–but I prefer the presentation of good sushi to weirdly flavored haute cuisine morsels. I would personally hate the one-bite-per-course presentation of many of the expensive haute cuisine restaurants.

That said, I think these high-tech haute cuisine chefs are missing out on one of the key traits of food: foods are natural, organic things that are not meant to be “pure” of flavor (ever notice how terrior foods are so expensive? That’s precisely because they’re “impure” and influenced by their place of origin). Here are a few paragraphs from the article that exemplify what bothers me about this trend:

The French Laundry’s [Thomas] Keller is not only the current arbiter of what counts as good food, he’s also [Grant] Achatz’s mentor and he catered Achatz’s wedding. Still, there’s no real secret to a Keller parsley sauce, Achatz explains. He’d puree parsley and oil in a blender and strain it.

“Then he’d have parsley oil,” Achatz says. “It tastes like parsley and oil.” Achatz instead starts with parsley juice, maybe a little water and salt. “That liquid is going to taste intensely of parsley, because that’s all it is. Then I’d thicken it with Ultra-tex 3, a modified starch that imparts zero flavor but gives it the same viscosity as oil.”

Keller, in other words, would have compromised the flavor of the parsley. Achatz believes that technology can actually deliver a purer dish.

What exactly makes a parsley-oil sauce “impure?” Oil does have a flavor–a very individual flavor by brand and batch and type–and perhaps that’s exactly the point. Garlic-flavored extra-virgin olive oil isn’t “impure” when compared to pureed garlic thickened with Ultra-tex 3. It’s a wonderful blending of flavors that will be different every time you make it according to the variety of garlic and variety of oil used.

And that’s what makes cooking art. “Pure” in this case seems to be just another word for “standardized.”

Edit: I’d like to clarify that I’m not opposed to molecular gastronomy in general. There’s a great Discover article from the February issue called Cooking For Eggheads (Patricia Gadsby) which gives some good examples of how you can improve food with science. And of course, like anyone who ever considered being a chemistry major, I know that ice cream frozen with liquid nitrogen has the creamiest texture.