I returned to Spain once again this past January. At this year's Madrid Fusion, the one slot everyone was looking forward to was a panel discussion between five food heavyweights. The subject they were trying to tackle had personal meaning to me, because I am invested in the genre they were trying to define: label and defend. It was supposed to be an effort to determine what Molecular Gastronomy was, if it really exists, and if so why are people afraid of it. I was certainly intrigued. Finally, the leading practitioners have a platform to define the style, defend it, and give it meaning and purpose while explaining why it exists.
There was one problem: very little was said about any of those things. Ferran Adria used the example of cocoa production. Holding up a candy bar, he explained that without science, the common chocolate bar would be impossible, Heston Blumenthal used a similar analogy for refined table sugar. I did find Harold McGee's explanation of how the term Molecular Gastronomy was originally coined interesting, and the history of the first meeting based on the subject in Italy circa 1992 was a good nugget of information to have.
