How do you dream up new dishes for the best restaurant in the world? Can small cheese makers produce their fare safely? Why do we like our fat, sugar and salt in bland junk food rather than in an exotic Indian curry? Is there a smart way to stop us eating ourselves to death? Bob Holmes quizzed Harold McGee, the man every chef, food grower and health minister wants to talk to.
Many people love food and cooking, but you turned it into a science. What happened?
It was the 1980s and my girlfriend – soon to be my wife – was a biologist. My friends and I were all in the literature department at Yale. When we got together for potlucks, it wasn’t easy to find common ground. What kept coming up was the food and the wine: how they worked, how they got to be that way. One of my friends said: “I love beans, but if I have more than one serving, I suffer. Why is that?” I thought it was a great question, and started to look around. I found this vast literature of food science and food technology out there for people in manufacturing, but it had never been translated into plain English for cooks or people who were interested in food. I thought that would be an interesting book to do. In the process of doing it, I fell in love with food.
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Heston Blumenthal, the British chef behind the “world’s best” restaurant, the Fat Duck, credits you as a major inspiration for his “molecular gastronomy”. You spent some days with him recently – what have you two been cooking up?
One of the things we experienced at a restaurant in Spain was a dish that was an oyster on top of a jelly. The jelly was clear, but when you put it in your mouth it had the aroma of earth. It turned out they had distilled off the volatiles in the dirt. This opens up the possibility of introducing flavours and aromas that might not be in the foods themselves, but are part of the ambient experience.
How would that work?
Suppose you’re trying to evoke a seaside, then the things you find along the seaside are going to contribute. That made us think: boats are held to the pier with rope. Would that be an interesting smell? Somebody went off to the local hardware shop and got some sisal. We distilled sisal and came up with a smell that was not very appealing. It reminded most people of an old rug. You wouldn’t want it in the food, but it was really interesting to see what happened when you concentrated it. We were just exploring the olfactory nature of things that until recently you would never think of in the context of a restaurant meal.
That sounds a bit flash and gimmicky. Is there anything of value here?
I think so. It’s a matter of making the dining experience less predictable. Heston is trying to make every moment as significant as possible. If he can do that by serving a dish that looks perfectly ordinary and then surprises you, that’s going to make the whole experience more interesting. If you don’t know exactly what is going on, your brain works a lot harder. You’re engaged in a way you wouldn’t normally be. The more you pay attention, the more you experience, and the more interesting and fun it’s going to be.
I think it makes you a better eater, an eater capable of getting more pleasure. To me, that’s the value of molecular gastronomy.
You also support the Slow Food movement, which promotes and protects local, traditional foods. Is there a contradiction between this culinary Luddism and your science-based approach to food and cooking?
Not really. A big piece of what Slow Food is about is legitimising small-scale production. One way to do that is by scientifically working out what makes those small-scale products unique and worthy of protection and preservation. Take cheese. In Switzerland, they have done a lot of work on the difference in flavours between cheese made in the alpine meadows and then at various places down the side of the mountain, relying more and more on hay from the plains. These alpine pastures give you milks and cheeses that are very different from what you can get otherwise, and it is worth preserving.
Why?
The thing about traditional products is that they were optimised over centuries or millennia by the palates of the people producing them. If all those people cared about was preserving milk over the winter as safely as possible, they would just salt the hell out of it, forget it and spend their time doing something else. What they did was develop these production techniques that teeter on the edge of safety sometimes, but they give you something that pleases the human organism in a way that nothing else does. To say that safety and hygiene absolutely trump enjoyment and therefore we should go back to making everything as uniform and indistinguishable as it might have been in the early days of preserving milk is a real step backward.
But small-scale, traditional producers of raw-milk cheeses sometimes fall foul of modern hygiene standards. Who should win?
Ensuring a safe food supply has lots of merit – you don’t want people suffering from what they eat. The problem is not in requiring that small-scale producers produce hygienic food. The problem is in requiring a particular path to that end rather than working with the producers to find a path – maybe making a new path – that is respectful of the tradition they are keeping alive and accommodates it as much as possible. If you just shut people down because they can’t afford $500,000 to refit their plant with pasteurisers and all the plumbing, then you have taken a piece of society that was productive and ended it. If you can find a way for them to make cheese that is affordable so they can continue making a distinctive product safely, then you have made a contribution to your society.
What about organic food? Is it better for us?
There are many different reasons that we make the choices we make every day about what to buy and what to eat. Doing good by our bodies is a big part of that, but it’s not the only part. If you are concerned about the degradation of ecosystems, then even though omega-3 fatty acids are good for you, you begin to think twice about having fish, and about what fish you pick. You don’t pick the cheap farmed salmon with high omega-3s, because they are not good for the wild populations. You wait for the wild salmon and get omega-3s somewhere else – oysters, say, which are pretty clean. Understanding the consequences of our food production systems is becoming more and more important to more and more people. It is a complicated, multidisciplinary scientific question.
Is there one “healthiest” diet?
As far as diet and health go, my sense is it’s going to be a continuing refinement of the old idea that the more varied your diet, the better off you are. My general sense is that there are things in a lot of foods that are useful to us biochemically and physiologically, and different foods provide different kinds of molecules. No one of them is the magic bullet against cancer or heart disease or anything like that, so it is really going to be a matter of balance, and figuring out which things to be sure to have every day, which things to have regularly, and which things to have only when you feel like indulging. I don’t see any revolutions in the making.
Do you mean moderation in all things?
Well, it was the food writer M. F. K. Fisher who said, “Everything in moderation, including moderation.” If you’re living your life only with an eye toward lasting as long as you possibly can, then you are going to lose out on a lot of wonderful experiences that satisfy the part of our biology that gets pleasure from overindulgence, from feasting. I think that is a real part of life and our quality of life. Once you talk about that, you leave the realm of nutritional science and start to ask questions about why we are here and what the point is, and I think that depends on individuals.
But surely we’re just eating too much, aren’t we?
I think we’re going to have to find ways to satisfy people without over-nourishing them. Our appetite is greater than our need for calories right now, so we have to find ways of modulating that appetite – either changing appetite itself, or finding better ways to satisfy it that don’t involve consuming more calories than we need. I think understanding appetite, and the pleasures of taste and smell, is going to become more and more important.
And yet immoderation and its consequences seem to be all around us: poor eating habits, obesity and diseases of over-consumption. Is something fundamentally wrong with our attitude to food?
I have a problem with thinking that the culture as a whole has a correct or incorrect attitude. We as a species have evolved both biologically and culturally and we find ourselves at a moment when we have this biological heritage that is not working well with the kind of food supply our culture has made available to us. Not that long ago, when culture was evolving slowly and locally, people came up with something like an optimal solution for their climate and the plants and animals available to them. The problem now is that there are no limits. We can have anything we want anytime, and we have not caught up in our thinking with that change. It’s true we have some readjusting to do of our attitude toward food, but I wouldn’t say it is wrong, I’d say it is in process.
Last year, British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver created a storm when he started trying to reform school food. Do we need efforts like that to fight obesity?
When I was in the UK, the government announced that junk food would not be sold on school premises. I think something like that can make a huge difference. If you make it harder for people to get the stuff, that is going to have an effect. Of course, it depends; if people really want something, they’ll get it.
We evolved to crave fatty, high-energy foods. Can food science find a way around that?
If there is one, we haven’t found it yet. Olestra, which is a non-caloric fat, was going to make a big difference, we all thought, but doesn’t seem to have made any. It gives you all the sensory attributes of fat, but not the calories, so you are hungry again. In this culture, when you are hungry you eat, so making fat mimics without the calories doesn’t seem to be the answer. What is it about junk food that makes it so appealing? In many respects, it’s pretty bland or one-dimensional, and you might think a food with lots of different flavour components – like Indian food – would somehow be more satisfying. Why is it that this particular form of food, which is really sweet, or really fatty, or really salty, or really meaty, seems to not only satisfy, but to satisfy to the exclusion of lots of other things?
Have you answered your question?
The closest I came was when I had dinner with a neurobiologist at Yale called Gordon Shepard, who has worked on olfaction for decades and is just finishing a book on taste and smell and life. The idea was that junk food has become a caricature of food as our ancestors would have known it. Instead of being various and including lots of different things and requiring lots of work by the eater to make it edible, it is ready to go, ready to be digested, and just hitting one or two or three of the many notes it could hit. Why this would satiate more slowly rather than the reverse is still not known. Of course we need fat and salt and sugar, so we have a taste for them, but why is giving yourself a big blast somehow more satisfying than giving yourself a little bit with lots of other things?
Profile
Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking was first published in 1984. He spent 10 years working on a revised version, published in 2004 by Scribner in the US and by Hodder in the UK. He also wrote The Curious Cook (North Point), which includes experiments and answers to such culinary questions as does washing mushrooms makes them soggy (it doesn’t), does searing a steak “seal in the juices” (it doesn’t) and how do you make mayonnaise without egg yolks (easy)