Euroscience Open Forum 2012

Cuisine is both an essential daily dose and a strong marker of national identity. It is also an ever changing entity. In recent years the workshop for new foods and new cuisine is taking food out of the kitchen and in to the lab. Indeed the role for those who wish to create new haute cuisine is really changing from ‘head chef’ to ‘head scientist’. The scientific approach to food became popularised as something of a novel notion for the elite in society, yet now it has become the norm in approaching everything that we eat. Sustainability too brings about a necessary task in changing the way we look at and source our food. This teases us to find new ways and new solutions to how we maintain both ourselves and our food sources. This session will look at the progressive role that science is playing in the advancement of cuisine and the way we look at food. Panellists of this lunchtime session will include the ‘father of molecular gastronomy’; Hervé This (AgroParisTech), President Obama’s Executive Pastry Chef; Bill Yosses, and Mark Post (Maastricht University) who has developed a process for growing meat in vitro. Following the panel discussion, attendees will be able to sample some futuristic cuisine.