19. Waiter, There’s a Physicist in My Soup! (Part 1)

The "molecular gastronomy" movement -- which gets a bump in visibility next month with the publication of the mammoth cookbook "Modernist Cuisine" -- is all about bringing more science into the kitchen. In many ways, it's the opposite of the "slow food" movement. In this episode, you'll hear chieftains from the two camps square off: Alice Waters for the slow foodies and Nathan Myhrvold for the mad scientists. Bon appetit!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:48Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:20Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  What did you have for dinner last night?

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Pasta with mushroom sauce.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Grilled cheese sandwiches. Artichokes and cardoons and capers. We had leftovers.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  I would call it a chicken Kiev.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  Meyer lemon fennel treat.

• 2:43Speaker 05

  I just got a hot dog on the street.

• 2:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, what did you have for dinner last night? And more important, why? Do you spend a lot of time thinking about what makes it to your plate and how it got that way? About how this amazing collaboration of agriculture and economics and politics and science, lots and lots of science, gets roughly 7 billion of us fed every day? In this episode, you'll hear from some people who spend nearly all their time thinking about that. It's so filling, we're serving it up in two courses. So go ahead, grab your fork. We're going to start you off with the cookbook to end all cookbooks.

• 3:32Speaker 06

  From WNYC and American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Today, a waiter, there's a physicist in my suit. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 3:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Raise your hand if you really like to eat. Yeah, me too. What's not to like? Food is awesome. It's even fun hearing people talk about food.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Something that's timeless, really. Picking walnuts off a tree in the fall, cracking them open and eating them.

• 4:10Nathan Myhrvold?

  So with a vacuum desiccator, you suck air out, which allows you to dry food at low temperature.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  First thing Monday, call the fishermen and see what happened.

• 4:21Nathan Myhrvold?

  Water is a polar substance. Now what that means is the charge is not evenly distributed. That's another way to say they stick together.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  I'm thinking about root vegetables in the fall and in the winter. I'm thinking about nuts, dried nuts and berries. I'm thinking about jams and syrups. I'm thinking about dried beans of all kinds, of grains like lentils.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  A split pea.

• 4:52Nathan Myhrvold?

  So then you cook it to perfect medium rare. Then you dunk it in liquid nitrogen, which freezes the outside. Then we deep fry it. We pop it in a deep fryer. Or use a torch on it.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  I'm Alice Waters, and I'm the owner of Chez Penisse Restaurant in Berkeley, California. And I'm also the founder of the Chez Penisse Foundation.

• 5:17Nathan Myhrvold?

  OK, well, I'm Nathan Myhrvold, and I'm both an inventor and a cookbook author. I trained as a physicist, and then I worked with Stephen Hawking on quantum field theory and curved spacetime and the origin of the universe.

• 5:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alice Waters is the godmother of the slow food movement, the locally sourced, back-to-nature feeding frenzy that's epitomized by her restaurant, Chez Penisse, in Berkeley, California. Waters might be the person most responsible for turning "organic" into a household word, for leading the charge to eat "slow food," simple food, real food. Nathan Myhrvold is the former chief technology officer of Microsoft. He graduated from high school at 14, had his PhD by the time he was 23. Now he's in his early 50s, and he's become a bit of a polymath. He's an accomplished nature photographer and mountain climber. He collects rare books and rocket engines.

• 6:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  After leaving Microsoft, he co-founded an invention company called Intellectual Ventures outside of Seattle in Bellevue, Washington. The inventors on his staff are trying to come up with a better version of nuclear power, a better way to perform brain surgery. They're trying to stop hurricanes and global warming.

• 6:29Nathan Myhrvold?

  Well, we have a whole diversity of both projects and people. Right beside the kitchen is our insectory, where we grow mosquitoes. And we grow mosquitoes because we have a number of anti-malaria projects. And you have to know your enemy. So we grow malarial mosquitoes, and it's literally right beside the kitchen. We grow thousands of mosquitoes so that we can test different ways to kill them, attract them, repel them. Our single most dramatic way of doing it is a device that spots mosquitoes in the air and shoots them out of the sky with laser beams. And that that sounds like something from an Austin Powers movie, but by God, it works.

• 7:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  That kitchen Myhrvold keeps mentioning? It isn't your standard little office kitchen, a microwave, a fridge, a hot plate. And Myhrvold doesn't think about cooking the way you or I do.

• 7:26Nathan Myhrvold?

  Cooking is an example of applied physics, because of course, heat, applying heat to food is the key technique in cooking. Obviously, there's things that you serve cold and you don't cook, but the single biggest technique in cooking is applying heat. And the physics of heat conduction, whether, or heat radiation and convection, those are very important to cooking. Chemistry is also important, because there are lots of different chemical reactions. That's why meat browns, for example. There's a reaction called the Maillard reaction, first described in the 19th century by a French physician. That's what makes meat brown. But there's also caramelization reactions. That's what makes caramel, the wonderful color it is.

• 8:11Nathan Myhrvold?

  Most of the time, by the way, in a menu where it says caramelized, they really mean Maillardized, but it doesn't sound as good, so the menu says caramelized.

• 8:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nathan Myhrvold is part of a movement, a strange, fascinating, growing movement known as molecular gastronomy. He traces its roots to the mid-1980s, when there were a handful of chefs--

• 8:37Nathan Myhrvold?

  Particularly a guy named Ferran Adria in Spain, started experimenting with techniques that were, pushed the envelope of what was possible in food.

• 8:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  These chefs brought a lot of science into the kitchen. They used the tools of chemistry, physics, even engineering to build new textures, new sensations, to do things you might not have thought possible, or advisable, with food. So today, in some of the most expensive restaurants in the world, they produce some of the most sought-after dishes. Maybe you'd like to start with the white beet soup with liquid nitrogen-frozen crab-apple spätzle. Then maybe you'll move on to the bison, pan-seared with bacon bits and tapioca starch alongside a dehydrated leek ring with a goat cheese sphere and chili powder on foamed carrot juice. And, for dessert, maybe you'd like to smoke our virtual chocolate cake from a pipe?

• 9:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  For his intellectual ventures kitchen, Myhrvold recruited some chefs who appreciated molecular gastronomy as much as he did, who looked at the kitchen as a place to experiment, to have fun, where you'll cut up watermelon in a meat slicer and then vacuum-infuse starch into its cells so that you can deep fry yourself some watermelon potato chips, where you'd consider the cheeseburger, the humble cheeseburger, a piece of food that's worthy of a scientific overhaul.

• 10:04Nathan Myhrvold?

  You have a problem with a hamburger. You'd like to have the meat cooked perfectly, at least I'd like it medium rare, but you also like the outside to be brown and crusty. And it's very hard to get the outside brown and crusty without having a fairly thick layer of sort of a grayish, overcooked meat in there. If you've ever bitten into a hamburger and looked at it, you'll see particularly a thin hamburger. There's only a very tiny amount that's actually medium rare. Turns out, there's a way to solve that. And our ultimate hamburger is you take the hamburger, you cook it sous vide.

• 10:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sous vide, that means under vacuum, when you seal food in a plastic bag and cook it very slowly in a warm water bath.

• 10:45Nathan Myhrvold?

  Actually, you don't vacuum seal it. You just put it in a Ziploc bag so that it's not compressed, because it turns out the compression of the vacuum, we think, hurts the texture. So then you cook it to perfect medium rare. Then you dunk it in liquid nitrogen, which freezes the outside. Then, we deep fry it. We pop it in a deep fryer. Or you use a torch on it, a blowtorch. And either one will give you this incredible crusty outside, but because you put it in liquid nitrogen, that prevents it from overcooking. So you get perfect, medium-rare hamburger.

• 11:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  We should make it clear here that Nathan Myhrvold hasn't been doing all this experimental cooking just for kicks or to feed the inventors on his staff. He is about to publish a book, a combination cookbook, encyclopedia, and science text, called Modernist Cuisine. It was produced by a team of about three dozen people, chefs, writers, editors, photographers. It covers everything from microbiology in the kitchen to a simple explanation of heat and water, which, Myhrvold notes, is the single most important relationship to understand when you're standing over a stove.

• 11:50Nathan Myhrvold?

  Well, it is an encyclopedic treatment of the science of cooking, how cooking really works, and describes modern cooking techniques that evolved over the course of the last 20 years.

• 12:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  It has many volumes, many pages. So, give us some of the vital statistics.

• 12:08Nathan Myhrvold?

  Six volumes, 2,400 pages, 3,500 color photographs, 1,600 recipes. My favorite statistic is if you took the text and you put it all in one line, just at the 10-point size, it would be six miles long.

• 12:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Talk about some of the physical acts involved in making the book. So, we're looking at a photograph here on your screen, "Traditional Cooking," and it seems to show, if I can tell without knowing, a cross-section of a pot with something that looks hammy in it, perhaps?

• 12:44Nathan Myhrvold?

  It's a pork roast.

• 12:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  A pork roast, okay. And it looks as though there's fire embers, coal embers, above and below, so some kind of Dutch oven-y.

• 12:54Nathan Myhrvold?

  It's in a cast-iron Dutch oven.

• 12:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  But we're looking into the pot as though we have 3D vision. It's a cutaway. So, describe, how do you make that?

• 13:02Nathan Myhrvold?

  So, that was one of the key concepts in the book, was that we wanted to show people what happens inside the pot, inside the microwave oven, inside whatever thing they're cooking in. And so, we cut a lot of pots in half. We cut a whole microwave oven in half. We even cut a $5,000 professional steam oven in half, in order to show people what processes are going on during the cooking process.

• 13:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Presumably, there's not a lot of resale on a half oven, right?

• 13:37Nathan Myhrvold?

  Yeah, we have two halves of one of the best kitchens in the world, Meryl.

• 13:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Myhrvold is self-publishing the book in early March. The list price is $625. You can get it for a little less on Amazon. If you randomly flip through the six volumes, you come upon some interesting things, like an entire chapter on foam.

• 14:02Nathan Myhrvold?

  Whip cream is of course a foam, so is meringue. Bread is a foam. You may not think of it that way, but bread is what we classify as a set foam. Gas in the bread, which is created either by baking powder or created by yeast, foams a dough, and then we heat it in the oven to set the starches and proteins. So tremendous amount of cooking is about foams. We want to explain, how do foams actually work?

• 14:33Speaker 05

  I mean, I laughed out loud. They made me some foamed baked potato. And it tastes like baked potato with butter and bacon bits and chives and everything in there, but it was foam. And I took a bite of it and I just lit up. I couldn't believe how good it was.

• 14:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Pablo Holman. He's a renowned computer hacker who now works as an inventor at Intellectual Ventures. But Holman isn't part of the team that produced the cookbook.

• 14:58Speaker 05

  My projects have been, I worked on a brain surgery tool where we're trying to make helical needles that could spiral into the brain and access regions of the brain that you can't get to with straight tools. I worked on a system for suppressing hurricanes. Last year I tried to cure cancer, which didn't work out.

• 15:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  But for the past couple of years, Holman did sit really close to the Intellectual Ventures kitchen.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  That kitchen is pretty remarkable in that, you know, unlike your kitchen, they have all kinds of amazing tools. They have a drill press and a bandsaw in the kitchen, but they also have a rotary evaporator and a homogenizer and a centrifuge and a pharmaceutical freeze dryer. And what they do is they make these really elaborate recipes. I mean, some of their recipes, their average is like 15 pages or something, and they'll spend like two weeks making something the size of a grape, which is amazing. I mean, they can really do some amazing stuff. And then they feed me quite often, and I have no idea what I'm eating. You know, it's always some bizarre thing where they took an entire mousse and distilled

• 16:12Speaker 05

  it into, you know, a coffee bean and, you know, infused it with whipped cream. I don't know.

• 16:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up, Alice Waters tells us why she doesn't like Nathan Myhrvold's cooking. And she describes the first Big Mac she ever ate. It was also the last.

• 17:01Speaker 06

  From WNYC and American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 17:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nathan Myhrvold points out that about 2/3 of the recipes in his 2,400-page cookbook, Modernist Cuisine, can be made in a regular kitchen, as long as you've got an adventurous spirit and don't mind ordering some ingredients online. You should, however, be prepared for instructions like, "drop frozen cherry spheres into hot sodium alginate bath," or, "blend in calcium gluconalactate and xanthum gum to fully disperse." And if you're making gel cubes from concentrated fruit, make sure you know the acidity level, so you'll know whether to use sodium bexamethaphosphate or methylcellulose E4M as your gelling agent. Sounds fun, doesn't it?

• 17:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'll tell you one person who doesn't think it's fun: Alice Waters. I asked her what she thinks of molecular gastronomy.

• 18:00Speaker 02

  I can't say that I care a lot about it. I can't say that.

• 18:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  And tell me why.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Because I'm trying to get back to a kind of taste of food for what it is.

• 18:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  And molecular gastronomy is trying to accomplish what, in your view?

• 18:26Speaker 02

  In my view, it's to...

• 18:31Speaker 02

  You know, make it into something you can't imagine. You know, surprise you. Now, it's not to say that I haven't been delightfully surprised. It's not that, it's that I, I, I am so hungry.

• 18:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 19:36Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 19:57Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 20:30Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 21:01Speaker 02

  For the taste of the real, that I'm just not able to get into that which doesn't feel real to me. It's a kind of scientific experiment, and I think there are good scientists and, you know, crazy, crazy, crazy old scientists that can be very amusing. But it's more like a museum to me. It's not a kind of way of eating that we need to really live on this planet together.

• 21:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm just curious, I have to ask, have you ever eaten a Big Mac, let's say?

• 21:52Speaker 02

  I did one time, actually. I did. I went to Kansas, and I was on the way to a board meeting at the Land Institute in Salona, Kansas. And I came in on a plane and hadn't eaten, and I thought I should get a little bite someplace before I went to the meeting. And then I decided I would do this little experiment, and went to McDonald's drive-thru. And in and out in five minutes.

• 22:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  And?

• 22:24Speaker 02

  And.

• 22:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  How was it?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Well, for me, it didn't, it wasn't, it wasn't tasty. I mean, it was soft bread and salty french fries, and I, I mean, really objectively, it was kind of nondescript.

• 22:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Alice Waters doesn't like Big Macs at all, and she thinks people like Nathan Myhrvold are mad scientists. Their pyrotechnics might be entertaining if you didn't have something better to do, if you didn't have maybe an open hearth where you can fry a free-range egg on a long-handled metal spoon, and serve it over a salad of chives and tomatoes along with some organic bread. Alice Waters's idea of advancing the way we eat is to reconnect with the past, not only how our food is prepared, but how it's grown, or raised, or caught. What she's after above all is simplicity.

• 23:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nathan Myhrvold, for his part, loves Chez Panisse, Waters's restaurant, but he also loves complexity. And he loves bringing science into the kitchen. Because, he says, it's already there.

• 23:39Nathan Myhrvold?

  Well, like it or not, physics happens. Okay? So it turns out, when you heat a piece of meat, there's a set of physical principles that are at work. Wishing doesn't make the food hot. It's the way molecules bump into each other that makes it hot. And if you can understand that in a reasonable way, I think it informs how you do cooking. Now, is it possible to cook without understanding? Of course it is. And for people that want to, just in a rote way, repeat exactly what they were told to do without understanding why it works, hey, go for it. You don't need me. If all you want to do is repeat the recipes of the past and you have no curiosity as

• 24:24Nathan Myhrvold?

  to how or why it works, then you don't need to have this physical understanding. On the other hand, I'd say, look, why does it ruin the experience to understand how and why it works? And, you know, when you drive over a bridge, don't you hope the civil engineer knows why bridges stand up? You know? Or you go up to the, you know, we're on the ninth floor of a building here, don't you hope that all those floors below us were designed by a guy who knows how buildings stand up? You know, I think that informing people, whether it's chefs, or it's foodies, or it's

• 25:06Nathan Myhrvold?

  the average person, informing them some of the ways that stuff actually works, I don't see how that is a problematic notion.

• 25:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nathan Myhrvold and Alice Waters both have an obvious passion for the future of food, but radically different ways to realize that vision. Myhrvold has a pharmaceutical freeze dryer that retails for $50,000. Waters doesn't even own a microwave. But the amazing thing is that her ideas have gained so much ground. A few decades ago, the organic food movement was fringe at best. Now, the USDA approves organic foods to be sold at Walmart. But what about Myhrvold's experimental approach? Is supercharging your dinner with ingredients that are centrifuged at 60,000 RPM really worthwhile? Cutting a microwave in half is good for grins, but is that all?

• 26:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is Myhrvold's $600 cookbook just a new toy for the Tesla crowd? Or is there a chance that all his scientific inquiry might trickle down to you and me? Or, better yet, to the hundreds of millions of people who could care less about molecular gastronomy because they're too busy trying to scrounge up a bowl of rice so their kids don't go to bed hungry? The fact is, there's already a lot more science in your kitchen and in your food than you might think. But how much is too much? That's a question we'll try to answer in part two of this episode. We'll look at the history of food science. Did you know there was a Napoleonic X Prize that led to a food breakthrough that's in

• 26:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  your kitchen right now? And we'll travel from France to a tomato farm in Morristown, Indiana, with a story about the invention that you probably benefited from just this morning when you had breakfast.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  A company called Tropicana came to my office and said, "Do you think it'll work for orange juice?" And with my fingers crossed, I said, "Well, I think so." And so, we actually changed the citrus industry with the nut from concentrate orange juice.

• 27:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, we'll look at the history of food science, but we'll also peer into the food future. Because as far as we've come, there's still problems to be solved. Here's Pablo Holman again, the hacker-turned-inventor who works at Intellectual Ventures.

• 27:32Speaker 05

  The way we eat is wildly inefficient. My understanding is about 50% of the food that we generate industrially...

• 27:42Speaker 05

  Doesn't get consumed. Half of it gets consumed on a caloric basis. Half of it gets consumed. The other half goes in the dump, one way or another. Right? Every grocery store in America is throwing out 2,000 pounds a week in expired food. Half of the produce and, I mean, all this stuff is going in the dumpster at restaurants as well.

• 28:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that's the problem, as Holman sees it. What we wanted to know is, does he have any solutions?

• 28:11Speaker 05

  I started looking at ways to improve all that, partly because, being a selfish American, I just wanted a faster, cheaper way to eat that was higher quality, better nutrition, better flavor and all that.

• 28:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  I cannot wait for you to hear what he came up with. If you think Alice Waters didn't like a Big Mac, well, she's not going to like this idea either, not one bit. We'll tell you all about it in part two of "Waiter: There's a Physicist in My Soup." For now, bon appetit and watch your fingers in that centrifuge.

• 28:54Speaker 06

  Freakonomics Radio is a co-production of WNYC, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. You can find more audio at FreakonomicsRadio.com. And if you want to read more about the hidden side of everything, go to Freakonomics.com.

• 29:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 29:59Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:44Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 31:07Speaker 08

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