Enjoy Your Weird Cult of Food

Just Don’t Lose All Sense of Irony

Adam Gopnik’s defense of molecular gastronomy is simple. “I love magic tricks,” he said. “You know it’s a trick; you know it’s not magic. But the very fact of doing it fascinates me, and the experience of pleasure I think is quite stirring.” For Gopnik, staff writer for the The New Yorker and author of The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food. dining is about “spectacle and surprise”–which is why the work of a chef like El Bulli’s Ferran Adrià, a pioneer in molecular gastronomy whose …

Oh, Sweet Velveeta!

What Should We Miss From the Decades When Salad Meant Jello?

 

Americans have never had as many food choices as they do today. Nor have they ever relished food more for its own sake. It’s all very haute, this attention to …