The emerging science of gastrophysics and its application to the algal cuisine

The father of gastronomy, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, defined 'gastronomy' in his 1825 masterpiece, Physiologie du go？t (The Physiology of Taste) [1], as the knowledge and understanding of everything that relates to man as he eats. Its purpose is to ensure the conservation of men, using the best food possible. Nowadays, 'gastronomy' is used as a broad term that covers the art and science of good cooking, including aesthetics, the qualities of raw materials, food preparation and cooking techniques, flavour and the cultural history of cooking. A wide range of established scientific disciplines relate to gastronomy, in particular food chemistry and technology, sensory sciences and human nutrition. A recent trend, pioneered by the British-Hungarian physicist Nicolas Kurti [2] and the French chemist Hervé This [3,4] and fuelled by a close collaboration between scientists and chefs, has led to the new term 'molecular gastronomy'. A closer inspection of what molecular gastronomy is claimed to be shows that in most cases it tends to involve few if any quantitative molecular considerations. Despite the somewhat misleading terminology, or maybe exactly because of the use of this terminology, molecular gastronomy has received a lot of publicity among the general public and celebrated chefs. Some prominent chefs, including Heston Blumenthal, from restaurant The Fat Duck, and Ferran Adrià, from restaurant El Bulli, have issued disclaimers stating that their art and style of cooking cannot be described by the concept of molecular gastronomy [5].In a recent review of molecular gastronomy, the British physicist Peter Barham and his colleagues [6] made a serious attempt to define what molecular gastronomy is and how it differs from gastronomy. These authors advocate the very pragmatic viewpoint that molecular gastronomy "should be considered as the scientific study of why some food tastes terrible, some is mediocre, some good, and occasionally some absolutely delicious" (p. 2315)