Evidence-based creativity: Working between art and science in the field of fine dining

Abstract

This article examines how scientific knowledge drives creativity in the small but influential culinary movement of ‘modernist cuisine’. Originating in the mid-1990s, modernist cuisine began with a small group of avant-garde chefs using science to produce wildly innovative culinary creations. Since then, many of the movement’s innovations, as well as its more general ‘science-based’ approach to cooking, have gained adoption among a diverse range of culinary professionals. But while science has enabled modernist chefs to produce a wide array of innovations and refinements, the group’s embrace of scientific values poses a potential threat to the subjective, intuition-driven logic of culinary creativity. Using data gathered through interviews and participant observation, I describe how modernist chefs navigate the potential challenges of using science in a creative field. I find that advocates of modernist cuisine address these challenges by adopting two separate rhetorical repertoires – one emphasizing science-based cooking’s advantages over traditional methods, and another that minimizes the differences between these approaches. Observing the strategic deployment of these repertoires illustrates the challenges to incorporating science into creative fields and reveals a complex and nuanced relationship between objectivity, evidence, and aesthetic judgement.

Keywords

creativity culinary arts culture evaluation/judgement expertise legitimacy scientific authority

Introduction

Standing at a spotless black bench before a wall of shelves resembling the periodic table, Homaro Cantu buttons up his white coat, powers on his ultrasonic homogenizer, and shoots me a mischievous grin. As the machine’s dull gray base unit begins to emit a low-pitched hum, he places its narrow metal wand into a beaker of translucent liquid. With the twist of a dial, Cantu turns up the frequency, and the homogenizer’s dull buzz rises to a deafeningly high-pitched shriek. Inside the beaker, the clear liquid solution slowly turns viscous and white.

Cantu powers down the homogenizer, gingerly dips the back of a spoon into the substance, and has a little taste. ‘This isn’t rocket science’, he explains. ‘If it doesn’t taste good, keep going back to the drawing board until you get it right.’

Indeed, this wasn’t rocket science, and Cantu was not a scientist. Prior to his death in 2015, Cantu was the acclaimed executive chef and co-owner of the Chicago restaurant Moto, and an outspoken advocate for a culinary movement popularly known as ‘modernist cuisine’.¹ Pioneered in the mid-1990s by experimental chefs like Ferran Adrià in Spain and Heston Blumenthal in the United Kingdom, the modernist cuisine movement employs science in the development of new culinary knowledge. And while modernist cuisine is best known for developing radical innovations like bacon foam and nitrous oxide sponge cake, in many ways, the movement’s more general ‘science-based’ approach to cooking poses a greater challenge to culinary tradition.

The culinary arts are not the only field in which science has recently grown in influence. In an age of ‘big data’ and rapid technological advance, previously esoteric areas of scientific knowledge have fast gained influence over a range of creative social contexts. Film critics compete with the recommendations of sophisticated algorithms; art historians quarrel with forensics experts over the provenance of paintings; and computer scientists employ natural language processing techniques to produce original works of poetry. In each of these fields, there is little doubt that scientific knowledge has expanded the boundaries of what is possible in interesting and important ways. But at the same time, the objectivity commonly associated with science would seem to be fundamentally incompatible with the intuition-driven actions and subjective process of evaluation inherent to such creative contexts.

Through an examination of the practices and rhetoric of the modernist cuisine movement, this article explores how creative actors who incorporate science into their work manage this apparent contradiction. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation of advocates for modernist cuisine, I investigate the specific ways modernist chefs incorporate science into their creative culinary endeavors, and how the movement’s participants position these actions in relation to more conventional culinary practices. I find that, to justify their unorthodox approach in a largely tradition-bound field, modernists do boundary-work (Gieryn, 1983) that highlights the shortcomings of conventional culinary methods, while portraying ‘science-based cooking’ as a means of overcoming these limitations. But in characterizing their approach as an ‘objective’, ‘evidence-based’ alternative to traditional cooking, the movement faces charges of inauthenticity from tradition-oriented producers and critics. To counter these challenges and legitimate their practices, modernists adopt a different kind of rhetoric that paints their approach not as a break from tradition, but as a new means of pursuing the classical culinary principle of ‘excellence’. Finally, although these repertoires – one seeking to demarcate between modernist cuisine and tradition, the other aiming to bridge this gap – may seem to contradict one another, I argue that this is not the case. Rather, their coexistence reveals the complex and nuanced ways in which creative producers incorporate formalized, scientific knowledge and practices into fields dominated by subjectivity and intuition-based judgement.

Data and methods

I examined science’s growing influence in the culinary arts through observation and in-depth interviews with participants from across the US culinary field. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 27 respondents, including chefs, restaurateurs, culinary instructors, scientists, food journalists and specialty equipment manufacturers.² I selected respondents with the aim of capturing attitudes and experiences from actors in a wide range of roles and positions, with special attention to those most heavily involved in scientific approaches to cooking. Of those interviewed, five held advanced degrees (master’s or doctorates) in the sciences, with three of those respondents working primarily in culinary education and consulting. Twenty-four of 27 respondents were men, reflecting a persistent gender divide in the larger culinary field (see Fine, 1996: 241) that is likely even more pronounced in the modernist community (Opazo, 2016).³ Of the three women interviewed, none currently worked in a restaurant kitchen: two were food writers and one was an academic scientist. As the community of science-based cooking is geographically diffuse, most respondents reported some amount of international work experience, though all but three resided in the United States. As many respondents agreed to allow the use of their real names, all names in this article are real. Respondents who did not wish to be identified are instead referred to in terms that describe their positions as accurately as possible, without sacrificing anonymity. A full list of respondents appears in the Appendix 1.

In addition to these in-depth interviews, participant observation was conducted in a number of contexts. I spent several hours observing experiments and dinner service in professional kitchens, sat in on classes at an elite culinary school, and attended more than a dozen workshops and symposia on modernist cooking in the New York and Chicago areas. During this fieldwork, I was able to observe modernist chefs in action, including how they set up their workspaces, conduct experiments, and evaluate their results. This fieldwork also provided an opportunity to see how culinary professionals talk to one another about science and cooking, and facilitated informal conversations with many more field participants. Altogether, these observations revealed a broader range of insights than would formal interviews alone.

While the modernist approach to cooking has advocates around the world, the culinary field in the United States provides a somewhat unique perspective on this phenomenon. In the American culinary landscape, the traditional ‘highbrow-lowbrow’ distinction that Bourdieu (1984) observed has been largely upended by a culture of ‘omnivorousness’ that valorizes exoticism and authenticity (Johnston and Baumann, 2007, 2009). This omnivorousness has resulted in a field where chefs may draw upon a more diverse array of cooking traditions in their creative pursuits. Indeed, in my fieldwork, I heard about and observed projects applying scientific knowledge and practices to cooking styles as varied as classical French, new American, Italian, Mexican, and Japanese.

Background: Tradition, creativity and science in the culinary arts

Culinary production has been viewed as a creative enterprise since at least the 19^th century, when influential chefs like Marie-Antoine Carême likened high-end cuisine to fields such as sculpture and architecture (Ferguson, 2004; Revel, 1982). But while professional cooking has long been considered an art, in the era of classical haute cuisine of the early 20th century, a chef’s work was arguably more technical than inspired. Charged with the faithful reproduction of elaborate dishes from canonical cookbooks like Auguste Escoffier’s (1903) Le Guide Culinaire, chefs in this period worked in the shadow of the restaurateur, and were afforded little room for personal expression in their work. This changed in the late-1960s, with the rise of nouvelle cuisine. Eschewing the overwrought sophistication of classical French cuisine in favor of a new emphasis on freshness, simplicity, and creativity, it was the nouvelle cuisine movement that truly elevated the chef from technician to artist (Ferguson, 2004; Rao et al., 2003). While technical execution remained a critical element of culinary production, chefs were expected to transcend convention and express a personal ‘point of view’ in their food (Lane, 2014; Leschziner, 2015).

By the mid-1990s, nouvelle cuisine had itself become fine dining orthodoxy, and many chefs began looking for inspiration in a wider range of global cooking traditions (Johnston and Baumann, 2009; Svejenova et al., 2007; Weiss, 2002). It was in this climate that the modernist cuisine movement was born. As others turned their attention to a wealth of previously untapped regional cooking styles, avant-garde chefs like Ferran Adrià, Andoni Luis Aduriz, and Heston Blumenthal sought culinary discovery through science. Often experimenting with ingredients and equipment previously reserved for laboratories or commercial food production, modernist chefs developed radical new textures, forms and dishes that could not be achieved using the classical culinary toolkit (Caporaso and Formisano, 2016; Opazo, 2012; Svejenova et al., 2007). Hot flavored gels, green tea ‘caviar’ and translucent ‘ravioli’ are just a few of modernist cuisine’s more conspicuous creations (Figure 1). Initially dismissed by many critics as a gimmick prioritizing shock over substance, modernist cuisine has since made an indelible mark on the larger culinary field. In the past two decades, many modernist chefs have gained widespread critical acclaim for their work, and a number of techniques developed and refined in modernist kitchens have found extensive adoption in the larger fine dining community (Blanck, 2007; Lane, 2014; Leschziner, 2015).

Figure 1.

Green tea ‘caviar’. Credit: Javier Lastras, Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/jlastras). Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Despite its many successes, perhaps inevitably, enthusiasm for the modernist cuisine’s distinctive style of food has begun to flag in recent years. But as iconic experimental restaurants close their doors and many modernist chefs turn their attention to more traditional fare (Lane, 2014), the modernist movement’s more fundamental practice of ‘science-based cooking’ has proven more enduring. Today, chefs from across the culinary spectrum employ scientific knowledge and methods to pursue a diverse range of goals, from developing innovative new dishes, to updating techniques and recipes that had remained unchanged for more than a century. As this approach to cooking has gained momentum, some of the most prestigious (and conservative) culinary schools in the United States have begun offering courses and degrees in ‘culinary science’, where chef-instructors and trained scientists lecture side-by-side, teaching the chemistry, biology and physics that underpin traditional culinary practices (Hollander, 2013). Once the domain of a niche movement of avant-garde chefs, modernist cuisine’s science-based approach to cooking has steadily found a wider audience in the culinary mainstream.

Tradition, creativity and expertise in the culinary arts

The ‘essential tension’ of culinary creativity

As creative professionals embedded within commercial organizations (i.e., restaurants), chefs face a unique set of social and economic constraints in their work. Above all, a chef’s dishes must exhibit attention to flavor. Flavor is the single most important principle of culinary creation, and it is a commitment to flavor that defines ‘excellence’ in the field (Leschziner, 2015: 138). Because chefs typically treat canonical ingredient combinations and preparations as exemplars of good flavor, the principle of excellence is closely associated with culinary tradition. But despite its considerable importance, flavor is not the only principle that informs culinary action. In the competitive field of fine dining, chefs must also showcase their creativity to attract the attention of diners and critics (Lane, 2014; Leschziner, 2015). Of course, this requires deviation from the traditional practices associated with flavor and culinary excellence. Thus, to gain prestige and commercial success, chefs face the seemingly paradoxical task of exhibiting both originality and tradition in their work. Chefs viewed as excessively unorthodox face accusations of inauthenticity or trend-chasing, while those who hew too closely to tradition risk getting lost in the crowd (Lane, 2014; Leschziner, 2015; Svejenova et al., 2007).

In some ways, this dilemma resembles what Kuhn (1977) called the ‘essential tension’ in science, where researchers must decide between the safe but low-impact questions of traditional science or risk failure with more innovative lines of inquiry. Just as scientists ‘take a position’ through the kind of research questions they ask (Bourdieu, 1975; Foster et al., 2015), chefs must survey the possibilities available to them and choose which avenues of culinary creativity they wish to pursue.⁴ Successfully navigating these possibilities requires a thorough command of the field’s body of explicit, technical culinary knowledge, a keenly trained sense of flavor, and an internalized intuition for how to employ this expertise in creative ways.

Formal and embodied culinary expertise

Technical culinary expertise – the body of knowledge that enables chefs to reliably perform the complex task of high-end food production – is essential to a chef’s capacity for culinary creativity. This entails highly formalized knowledge of canonical dishes and principals, as well as the more tacitly learned skills necessary to execute these elaborate instructions. Although it is now common for chefs to draw upon a diverse range of regional and ethnic traditions (Johnston and Baumann, 2007), classical French cuisine remains the formal foundation for this expertise. Cookbooks and instruction manuals written in the late-19^th and early-20^th centuries by French luminaries such as Escoffier and Carême helped codify, preserve, and disseminate a common body of formal culinary knowledge (Ferguson, 2004), and the influence of this work persists today. Classical French techniques and dishes still constitute the core curriculum at the world’s most prestigious culinary schools, and terms such as chiffonade, confit, mirepoix, and mise en place serve as the lingua franca of high-end kitchens around the world (Trubek, 2000). Culinary students gain early and frequent exposure to this knowledge through their coursework, but even those who opt out of formal education inevitably become familiar with the concepts and techniques of classical French cooking through its ubiquitous presence on the job.

The explicit definitions and precise instructions of classical French cuisine provide a blueprint for the reliable creation of canonical culinary products. But, as other scholars have noted, there is a limit to what kind of knowledge can been explicitly documented. In highly formalized fields such as medical diagnostics (Coopmans and Button, 2014), the physical sciences (Collins, 1974, 2001), and nuclear weapon design (MacKenzie and Spinardi, 1995), as well as more creative contexts such as sound recording (Horning, 2004; Porcello, 2004) and glass blowing (O’Connor, 2007), experts also rely on critical tacit understandings to successfully perform their work. The culinary arts are no different. As Fine (1996) notes, ‘cooks rely on timing (internal and external clocks), taste, smell, sight, touch, and, occasionally, sound.’ (p. 73) To facilitate development of these embodied skills, the culinary field has long relied upon an informal apprenticeship system, where the first several years of a cook’s career are treated as a period of extended training (Leschziner, 2015). During this time, professionals work their way through different kitchen ‘stations’, mastering new skills through a regiment of tireless practice and constant interaction with their more experienced colleagues.

It is during this period of training that chefs also develop and refine their embodied capacity for evaluating flavor. By continually making and tasting food, and by conferring with their peers and mentors about issues of flavor, chefs learn to distinguish between successful dishes and failures, attuning their personal senses to the field’s formal descriptions and creative principles. In doing so, they develop a personal understanding of how dishes ‘should’ be, which reflects both culinary tradition, as well as the individual chef’s unique set of professional experiences and interactions (Fine, 1996). Through this process, ‘culinary conventions become practical logic, an everyday kind of reasoning that requires no deliberative thought and helps chefs process information, generate ideas, and assess the quality of dishes’ (Leschziner, 2015: 102). Chefs come to experience this internalized logic as a set of intuitive guidelines (as opposed to strict rules) for culinary creation, which subsequently inform their decisions on how best to balance tradition (or flavor) and originality in their work (Leschziner, 2015).

Modernist cuisine and a ‘scientific approach’ to cooking

Modernist chefs face the same ‘essential tension’ between tradition and originality that confronts other culinary professionals, and very often begin their careers learning the same foundational culinary skills as their more conventional colleagues. Of the modernist chefs I interviewed, all began their careers with culinary school or jobs in traditional kitchens. Where mainstream chefs rely upon their mastery of canonical techniques and ingredients, however, modernist chefs talk of using science to achieve their culinary goals. But as a long line of research has noted, the very idea of ‘science’ is itself somewhat nebulous, consisting of a set of shared values, a range of practices, and a body of knowledge – each of which may be selectively emphasized depending on the context in which it is invoked (Gieryn, 1983; Merton, 1942; Mulkay, 1976). What, then, do modernist chefs mean when they talk of ‘science’, how does this figure into their work, and how does their approach differ from the field’s established practices?

As a relatively new phenomenon, modernist cuisine lacks the strong foundation of codified knowledge and practices that have long anchored the traditional culinary field. While a small number of respondents had formal training in both science and the culinary arts, such ‘dual expertise’ remains rare. And although a number of culinary schools have begun to offer courses and degrees devoted to scientific approaches to cooking, this formal training is not yet widespread enough to be the norm. Instead, the chefs I spoke to most often described cobbling together their scientific educations from a variety of sources, such as online blogs devoted to modernist cooking, textbooks and research papers, and direct consultations with scientists or other science-oriented culinary professionals.

Rather than use these sources to build the kind of broad foundation of scientific expertise that one might get with more formal training, these chefs typically pursue scientific knowledge on an ad hoc basis that depends on their specific culinary goals. For example, a chef seeking to develop a better hollandaise might learn how bonds form between lipid molecules before picking up some basic thermodynamics en route to a refined recipe for roast chicken. As a result of this largely self-directed approach, any two modernist chefs may have quite disparate levels of proficiency in different scientific subject areas. Despite this diversity of expertise, however, respondents’ accounts of science’s role in their work were remarkably consistent. These descriptions fall into two general categories: science as a body of knowledge, and science as a method for producing new knowledge.

Science as a body of knowledge

The first way in which modernist chefs portray science is as a set of established, objective facts about the natural world, which may be used in the pursuit of culinary goals. For chefs, this typically means learning to reduce ingredients and techniques to specific cases of more general scientifically defined materials and processes. In one culinary science course I observed, food scientist and trained chef Ted Russin described this as a transition from thinking about ‘macro-components’ to ‘systems of components’. Energetically pacing the classroom in a lab coat that distinguished him from the school’s traditional chef-instructors, he used the example of an egg yolk to illustrate the difference in perspectives. While a chef might typically think of a yolk as a single, irreducible component with a number of well-known uses, Russin noted that this ingredient can also be thought of as a complex collection of even more basic elements, such as water, lipids, amino acids and more. By adopting this perspective, chefs can use scientific knowledge about their ingredients – such as their molecular structures, pH levels, reactions to heat or hydration – to better inform their culinary decisions.

A story relayed separately by two respondents, a research chef and microbiologist, illustrates how this transition can yield new culinary insights. As this chef explained, his team had the idea of developing new variations on miso (a traditional Japanese paste made of fermented soybeans). But a lack of information on the topic presented a considerable challenge:

Making miso is incredibly, incredibly experience-driven. Like if you haven’t done it a lot, it takes making traditional miso for years [to get it right]. It’s not like making an emulsion, it’s much more complicated than that. So in the space of realizing that, we wanted to make all these things and we didn’t really have – we couldn’t just pick up a book or whatever and understand complex microbiological processes.

Without a thorough understanding of the process that transforms soybeans into miso, they began their experiments with the conventional culinary approach of combining ingredients and techniques in novel ways – in this case, applying the traditional method of making miso to ingredients other than soybeans. When their efforts produced a potentially noxious mélange of multicolored microbes, the team sought additional guidance. After a few inquiries, they were connected with two microbiologists at a major research university. In our interview, one of these microbiologists described how he and his colleague helped these chefs articulate their goals in more tractable, scientific terms:

[The chefs] were definitely coming to us with the question of, ‘Is this safe to eat?’ Because that’s their training. They want to have interesting things, but not poisonous things. And for us, we reshaped the question to be, ‘What’s there?’ ‘What microbes are there, and what are they doing?’ Which is definitely a more basic microbiology question. … We walked them through the difference between what is a bacterium and what is a yeast and what is a mold. Which doesn’t really seem that interesting, but it has huge impacts on what kinds of flavors you’ll get, and the aesthetics of those products.

As the research chef explained, this enabled his team to generalize the process of making miso, so that it could be applied to a host of new ingredients:

[We learned] a lot of microbiology and chemistry, and what [we] really focused on was understanding and harnessing this microbial metabolism, and being able to create conditions in which this metabolic pathway would function the way we wanted it to, but be able to feed a really diverse set of products, of foods – put a lot of things through this metabolic pathway. And that was how we started making miso out of every nut, bean, legume that we could think of.

Through this collaboration, these chefs ultimately began to think of the process of making miso not as a specific technique applied to a certain ingredient, but as a more abstract biological phenomenon.

Science as a method

Modernist chefs also commonly invoke science to describe a specific method for experimentation and discovery. Asked to explain how science has influenced his creative process, for instance, one research chef replied:

The role of science in the way I cook is, it’s more about methodology. The way I’ll set up a trial or figure something out is much more in line with the scientific method than just like, throwing stuff together.

While respondents offered different levels of detail about what this method entails, descriptions consistently emphasized controlling the environment, systematically varying key parameters and carefully analyzing results. Take, for example, this explanation, given by Kyle Connaughton, chef-owner of the Sonoma Valley restaurant Single Thread and former head of research at England’s celebrated modernist restaurant The Fat Duck:

We have a hypothesis, we set up controlled experiments, we control all the variables, we conduct the experiments and we gather data. We analyze the data and we draw conclusions. We replicate those conclusions. And then, we publish our results. And that, for chefs, is following the scientific method. And I tell chefs all the time, this is eighth grade science fair! You learn this in the eighth grade when you did your science fair project! Take that and apply it to your cooking.

While this may indeed sound familiar to most American middle school students, the culinary professionals I interviewed widely agreed that it is very much at odds with the way chefs have historically approached creative discovery. As respondents explained, chefs typically employ a more haphazard process of experimentation, in which trials are conducted one at a time, with several elements (such as cooking time or ingredient amounts) altered in each trial until a favorable combination is found (Arboleya et al., 2008; Laiskonis, 2012; Weiss, 2010). But while this process of trial-and-error makes sense to results-oriented chefs working with tight timelines and limited budgets, respondents noted that such a strategy comes with one key shortcoming. One academic scientist I spoke with explained:

You know in science, you almost always set up some kind of control and some kind of treatment group where you can look at how some manipulation or some treatment affects a system in some way. And often in a kitchen, because you are just trying to get something done, and it has to go in some direction and you have to produce something, you wouldn’t necessarily take the time to set up a control where it may not work out, or it may fail, or it may not taste good or look good. You wouldn’t necessarily do that. And then the challenge is that you never really know what you’ve done to push something in a good or bad direction, right? Because you don’t have any kind of baseline.

Where the traditional trial-and-error approach may ultimately yield results in the form of a new recipe, respondents argued that employing the scientific method enables chefs to better understand how specific techniques and ingredients affect their end product. Or, as acclaimed pastry chef Michael Laiskonis (2012) notes, ‘As we apply the basic scientific method – which includes careful observation and measurement to formulate and test hypotheses, together with a fundamental knowledge of the ingredients themselves – cooking becomes more orderly and efficient.’ (p. 277)

Demarcating between modernist and traditional cuisine

Science-based cooking as a new paradigm for culinary inquiry

Through their adoption of scientific knowledge and methods, modernist chefs have introduced an assortment of new techniques and dishes to the culinary field. Focusing solely on these products of science-based cooking, it is easy to think of modernist cuisine as just one in a long list of recent expansions of classical culinary knowledge. Just as chefs might now incorporate the flavors and techniques of Korean cuisine into their work, for example, so too might they adopt modernist-pioneered ingredients or methods. But although it was the culinary avant-garde who first embraced science as a means of culinary discovery, respondents roundly rejected the notion that science-based cooking is inherently associated with any particular style of food. Food scientist and culinary consultant Ali Bouzari explained:

Science in the kitchen, the idea of culinary science, it’s not a style. It knows no style. It’s just how food works. And from that, you can apply your own style to it, whatever you want.

Others overwhelmingly agreed that science-based cooking holds benefits for all chefs, regardless of personal style. As Dave Arnold, former culinary science instructor and author, and co-owner of the modernist cocktail bar Booker and Dax, remarked:

No matter how you cook, whether you cook like we were talking before – sticks in the fire – or if you’re using a centrifuge, it’s about observing your ingredients, and treating your cooking almost in the way you’d treat an experiment. … Thinking scientifically about it, in other words, breaking things into variables, controlling them, understanding what’s going on, helps you cook, no matter how you cook.

In minimizing modernist cuisine’s association with the culinary avant-garde and emphasizing science’s capacity to better understand all styles of food, respondents depict their approach to cooking as a new, superior paradigm (Kuhn, 1970) for culinary inquiry. To support this position, advocates of modernist cuisine commonly adopt a rhetoric that problematizes conventional culinary practices, while aligning their own work with the classically scientific values of skepticism and objectivity (Merton, 1942). Through this boundary-work (Gieryn, 1983), modernists distinguish their approach from culinary tradition and invoke the authority of science to assert the legitimacy of their claims.

Traditional authority and culinary myths

Among modernist cuisine’s advocates, one common observation is that traditional culinary training often provides chefs with a limited and sometimes inaccurate understanding of their materials and techniques. Culinary producers have long sought explanations for the processes of cooking, many of which appear on the pages of seminal culinary manuals and references (for a classic example, see Escoffier, 1907). But in a field with a strictly defined hierarchy, where lower-level staff are expected to blindly follow orders, several respondents commented that these explanations are often not conveyed to chefs-in-training. According to one classically trained respondent, ‘We are told one thing and we just replicate. And that’s the downside of the master and apprentice system. We essentially get told not to question a certain method.’ Even when such questions are asked, respondents observed that the answers provided are frequently unsatisfying. As another chef remarked:

You finally reach the point in the kitchen or a certain level where you can ask the question. Like, ‘Chef, why am I doing this?’ And the answer is always, like, ‘Because I said so’, or, ‘Because that’s the way I’ve always done it.’ I mean, we could go on for years and years as an industry without asking questions or getting the questions answered.

Respondents cited two negative consequences of this deference to tradition. First, although such blind repetition imparts chefs with the capacity to execute culinary tasks with proficiency, it provides little sense of the rationales that underlie these practices. As classically trained chef and modernist blogger Chad Galiano put it, ‘You were taught to do certain things, but you didn’t know why you were doing it.’ Respondents commented that without an understanding of how their ingredients and techniques function, it is difficult to know how to use these elements in new dishes. In one of our conversations, pastry chef Michael Laiskonis articulated this argument:

If you don’t know everything about your ingredients, how can you predict what going to happen to them when you apply a cooking method or another ingredient? Especially in pastry, where we have to deal a lot with a predictable outcome based on a pile of raw ingredients. Otherwise it’s just, ‘Cook and see, maybe it’ll turn out.’

Second, even when traditional culinary rationales are conveyed, several chefs noted that these explanations are often unverified, incomplete, or altogether inaccurate. In these cases, the field’s collective reluctance to challenge tradition has allowed these ‘culinary myths’ to persist as commonly held beliefs. One example cited by several respondents is the apocryphal notion that searing a steak ‘seals in the juices’. Chad Galiano explained:

You’re always given a piece of meat and you’re told ‘Sear a piece of meat and it seals the juices in.’ And [food writer] Harold McGee puts a book out and they do experiments, based on real information and real occurrences. And when you cook it, it shows like, this isn’t what’s happening. We’re not sealing in the juices, you know? It helps with flavor and everything else, and there are reasons to keep doing it, because you end up with tasty food. But we understand now that you’re not doing it [to seal in the juices].

Indeed, according to McGee (2004), the idea that searing meat makes it waterproof was hypothesized by a German scientist in the 1850s. In subsequent years, this explanation spread quickly among culinary professionals – including the hugely influential French chef and author Escoffier. Though debunked by a series of experiments in the 1930s, by this time the theory had gained widespread acceptance as fact within the culinary field. More than 80 years after being definitively discredited, this erroneous explanation is still propagated by many chefs and culinary instructors.⁵

Organized skepticism and scientific evidence

Where the tradition-abiding culture of the culinary mainstream has fostered the spread of many such specious claims, respondents characterized modernist cuisine in very different terms. Rather than relying on the word of their mentors and the wisdom of tradition, modernists describe their participation in a culture of organized skepticism (Merton, 1942) that encourages inquisitiveness and demands that knowledge claims be backed by evidence. One early adopter of modernist techniques recalled this shift as he began to interact with others in the movement:

Everyone actually started to learn the ‘why’ of what we’re doing. The ‘why’ of everything became more important, or the thing to answer. Not just, do what the chef says, and don’t question it. To question it, you know?

In this culture of skepticism, modernists frame their use of science as an evidence-based means of producing new, verifiable knowledge claims. This is especially true when these claims run counter to conventional culinary knowledge. Take, for example, Connaughton’s account of employing science to simplify the traditional process of making risotto:

We have been making risotto as chefs for now, well over 100 years, under the assumption that we need to add ladles of hot stock into our rice, and turn that rice constantly until all of the stock is completely absorbed before we add more stock. … It’s been very hard for [chefs] to accept that maybe that’s not correct. Because that’s a cooking technique that’s so deeply ingrained inside of us that it’s very hard for us to step outside of that and look at it in an entirely different way.

So what did we do? We set up very controlled experiments, where every single variable is controlled, and we looked at additions of stock, and we used temperatures and times, the incorporation of liquid, the release and hydration of the amylose and amylopectin starches. And we’ve been able to show and demonstrate and replicate that, in fact, you don’t need to do this! … If you know how much liquid that rice will absorb, you can add all of the liquid at one time, and you can let it simmer, and you can allow the rice to do the agitation. You can allow the force of motion, of the simmering rice, to hydrate the amylose and amylopectin.

By redefining the process of making risotto as a case of starch release and hydration, measuring these variables under different treatments (i.e., cooking methods) and emphasizing the replicability of his results, Connaughton presents scientific evidence to support his claim of a simpler way to make risotto. In doing so, he invokes science to challenge a technique that had been entrenched in culinary practice for more than a century.

Subjective evaluation and objective measurement

Advocates of modernist cuisine also contend that their brand of science-based cooking is more reliable and accurate than traditional methods. Although it is the chef’s creativity that garners the bulk of attention among diners and critics, there is also a strong expectation that a restaurant’s food will be prepared consistently from one visit to the next (Fine, 1996; Lane, 2014; Leschziner, 2015). Executive chefs understand this, and go through great efforts to achieve such continuity in their kitchens. But because restaurant food preparation often relies heavily on the embodied senses of several individual cooks, ensuring that dishes are consistently executed requires tight coordination and constant oversight. Modernists argue that many of their methods provide ways to more easily achieve this goal. By embracing technology previously reserved for commercial food production or laboratory use, and employing a range of objective measures to formalize what were once only tacitly defined criteria, they aim to make food production more reliable by reducing dependence on the subjective judgement of individual culinary producers.

Such appeals to objectivity are evident in the language often employed to describe the now widespread modernist technique of sous-vide cooking. With this technique, meats or vegetables are vacuum packed in plastic, then placed in a water bath that has been warmed with an immersion circulator – an electronically controlled device, originally used in scientific laboratories, that heats and circulates water to ensure temperature accuracy within a tenth of a degree or less (Figure 2). This allows food to be evenly heated to a precise temperature, and held for several hours without fear of burning or drying out. Advocates of sous-vide cooking argue that this method offers several advantages over traditional techniques. In his detailed guide to sous-vide steak, for example, J. Kenji López-Alt writes:

Sous-vide precision cooking offers unparalleled control over the results of your steak, letting you very precisely cook the steak to the level of doneness that you prefer. No more guesswork to guarantee a medium-rare temperature. No poking with a thermometer, no cutting and peeking, no jabbing with your finger – just perfect results every single time. (López-Alt, 2015)

Figure 2.

Two immersion circulators warm water baths for cooking eggs (left) and meat (right). Credit: Pedro.serna, Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikipedia.org). Licensed under Creative Commons BY SA 4.0.

Where traditional technique is portrayed as imprecise guesswork, sous-vide cooking offers reliability and perfection. And because sous-vide relies on the simple, objective measures of temperature and time (as opposed to the individual cook’s intuitive sense of ‘doneness’), executive chefs can be confident that their dishes are being accurately and consistently executed, without the close oversight typically required of restaurant work:

You can have your restaurant 6,000 miles away, and you don’t have to worry about the cooks at your restaurant in D.C. getting the duck right because they’re cooking it sous vide and they know the temperature (Chef Eric Ziebold, quoted in Hesser, 2005).

Modernist cuisine as legitimate culinary practice

Critiques of modernist cuisine

By characterizing their approach to cooking as a means of producing verifiable facts, and emphasizing their use of objective measures to reduce the role of subjective judgement in professional cooking, the modernist cuisine movement has aligned its work with science to make new knowledge claims and challenge longstanding culinary practices. In this, modernist cuisine follows a well-trod path of employing abstract, formalized knowledge to refute more embodied forms of expertise (e.g., Epstein, 1995; Marlor, 2010; Wynne, 1992). But where scientific authority has previously been invoked to advance policy positions (Drori and Meyer, 2006; Quark, 2012) and support claims of professional jurisdiction (Abbott, 1988), appeals to science face a unique challenge in creative contexts like the culinary arts. First, as a tradition-oriented field where audience expectations are shaped in large part by historical practice (Lane, 2014; Leschziner, 2015), the use of knowledge from so far outside the field’s established boundaries is likely to be met with skepticism or outright hostility by diners and critics. Second, although previous research has shown that critics in creative fields often strive for objectivity in their evaluative practices (Chong, 2013; Shapin, 2016), there is good reasons to believe this is not the case for producers. While ample research demonstrates that creative work is shaped by social context and interaction (e.g., Becker, 1982; Godart et al., 2014; Opazo, 2016; White and White, 1993), creative goods in the culinary arts continue to be thought of as the product of an individual’s personal artistic vision (Leschziner, 2015). In such cases, the objective, impersonal attributes that lend science its authority stand in direct opposition to the fundamentally intuition-based logics that inform creative work (Ankney, 2006).

Indeed, modernist cuisine has been subject to criticism on both of these grounds. Condemning the movement’s use of science as beyond the boundaries of legitimate culinary action, Spanish chef Santi Santamaria famously chastised modernist chefs for ‘poisoning diners’ with ‘unnatural’ ingredients (Levy, 2011), while food critic John Mariani once derided modernist cuisine as ‘the deliberate manipulation of an ingredient to be unrecognizable as food’ (Mariani, 2011). Meanwhile, other critics of modernist cuisine maintain that the movement’s embrace of objectivity and precision has robbed cooking of its creativity and emotion. In an essay defending the science-based cookbook Modernist Cuisine (Myhrvold et al., 2011), food critic Josh Ozersky aptly summarizes this perceived distinction:

The dichotomy has been set up between honest naturalist chefs on the one side – people who ‘cook from the heart’ and touch the soil – and on the other, cerebral nimrods who live in a la-la land of gels and immersion circulators (Ozersky, 2011).

Interestingly, the contrast Ozersky observes here reflects essentially the same dividing line drawn by modernist chefs themselves – though in far less favorable terms. Where these critics of modernist cuisine accept the demarcation between science-based and traditional cooking as separate categories of practice, they reject the modernist approach as mechanistic, unemotional, and generally inauthentic.

In a culinary movement best known for dramatic transformations of ingredients, where traditional practices are challenged and many intuition-based decisions are problematized as inconsistent and error-prone, how do participants address these critiques and assert their legitimacy as creative culinary producers? Modernists respond to this challenge with a different rhetorical repertoire that aligns their use of science with the culinary goal of creative expression, emphasizes the importance of tacit culinary expertise, and underscores modernist cuisine’s ties to culinary tradition.

Modernist cuisine as tradition

One way advocates of modernist cuisine assert the legitimacy of science-based cooking is by emphasizing the similarities between their approach and culinary tradition – what Bijsterveld and Schulp (2004) call ‘strategies of reconciliation’. For instance, several respondents offered that while modernist ingredients like sodium alginate, transglutaminase and methylcellulose sound more at home in a chemistry lab than the kitchen, familiar culinary ingredients like salt (sodium chloride) and baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) are just molecular compounds with ‘better marketing’. To this point, culinary science instructor Russin somewhat playfully remarked, ‘I hate it when people get upset with different types of molecules. It just seems unfair.’ Later in our conversation, he elaborated:

If you want to talk about a soufflé, the chef, pastry chef can talk all he wants, or she wants, about aerating the meringue, and using the right temperature to do this, and adding enough sugar to do this. And at the same time, as a scientist, I can tell you the whole story about the denaturation of the proteins, why do you have the solids present there, what are they doing to the water, how are they slowing it down? How is it stabilizing it? And those two things are not different. They’re the same conversation. They’re just two different sets of spectacles explaining the same phenomenon.

Others sought to minimize the gap between science-based cooking and culinary tradition by portraying modernist cuisine’s use of science as the realization of a long-held goal in the field’s unending pursuit of excellence. Connaughton explained:

Science has always been a big part of the kitchen. I mean, the kitchen is an amazing lab. It’s always been recognized as that. And you look back at [seminal 19^th century chef] Escoffier … he talked about understanding the science of cooking and how that was really the future of cooking. I mean, he’s written things up that sound like they could have been written in like the early 2000s! And so I think that it’s not that chefs were in the dark. I think chefs have always been very interested. … So [I] definitely don’t want you or anyone ever to feel that all of the sudden science has taken a new role. It’s always been there, it’s just that we are getting much better as a profession at really understanding it and using it.

Although modernist chefs’ newfound capacity to harness science for culinary gain has led to a wide range of new insights, respondents like Connaughton argue that these advances do not constitute a break from tradition, but a new development in the field’s ongoing quest for excellence. As such, science-based cooking is not necessarily a paradigm-shattering challenge to traditional culinary practice, but a logical step in a field quite accustomed to iterative progress. Rather than deny modernist cuisine’s scientific influences, these arguments portray the culinary field as similar to science in its unending pursuit of new knowledge.

Modernists also often emphasize their ties to convention through the products of their work. By pairing conspicuously innovative modernist techniques and ingredients with canonical forms or flavor combinations, these chefs produce food that demonstrates a close relationship between science-based cooking and the culinary mainstream. Starting with a traditional mojito, for instance, modernist chef José Andrés uses calcium chloride and sodium alginate (a technique known as ‘spherification’) to encapsulate the cocktail in a spoonful-sized edible bubble. Similarly, the restaurant wd~50 famously offered a twist on the classic combination of shrimp and noodles by using the protein-binding enzyme transglutaminase to create noodles made of shrimp. Where modernists’ rhetoric legitimates science-based cooking by situating the practice in a broader historical narrative of culinary progress, these culinary products demonstrate modernists cuisine’s capacity to extend the frameworks, conventions, and expectations of the traditional culinary field.

Culinary expertise and the limits of science

Modernists also position themselves as legitimate members of the culinary field by maintaining the value of traditional culinary expertise and emphasizing what science cannot do for chefs. As we have seen, modernists are generally happy to ‘talk shop’ about their use of scientific knowledge and methods – especially when these accounts justify novel claims or refute traditional culinary knowledge. But when conversations turn to how the products of science-based cooking should be evaluated, these chefs quickly shift to a vocabulary of intuition and subjectivity. Asked how they know if their experiments ‘work’, for example, respondents overwhelmingly abandon scientific language, instead deferring to the traditional culinary value of flavor. Although science-based cooking can inform novel ingredient combinations, produce new techniques, and provide the means for radical new presentations, respondents roundly agreed that none of this matters if the food doesn’t taste good. As chef Chad Galiano commented:

[At first] there was a lot of desire to have a hocus pocus sense about your food, or whatever. … But at the same time, smoke and mirrors are just smoke and mirrors. You still need to have good food.

This sentiment was echoed time and again in conversations with chefs, many of whom went out of their way to express their own commitment to flavor over other aspects of culinary creation, such as originality or presentation. One culinary science instructor gamely illustrated this point:

There’s a famous Spanish chef who had a demo …. He said, ‘You know, it’s not only important for the food to look good, it has to taste good, too.’ I’m like, you have that in reverse, you bastard!

Prioritizing flavor in this way allows modernist chefs to underscore the critical values they share with the culinary mainstream, while defending against charges that their food prizes technology over taste – a cardinal sin in the culinary field (Leschziner, 2015). But in a movement that often portrays subjectivity as a problem to be overcome, placing such emphasis on an intuition-based evaluation also reinforces the vital importance of a chef’s aesthetic judgement in modernist cooking. This is because, as several respondents commented, the experienced chef’s skill at evaluating flavor has no true equivalent in the sciences. Interestingly, this argument was most common among those with formal scientific backgrounds. Reflecting on the way flavor is often measured in food science, for instance, Russin remarked, ‘No one tastes food for sensory pleasure from a white Dixie cup, under florescent lighting. That’s just not a good experience.’ And as Chris Loss, a food scientist, trained chef, and the Director of Academic Research at the Culinary Institute of America, explained, the chef’s intersubjectively developed understanding of flavor is a unique advantage over those with purely scientific training:

Chefs have an intimate understanding of the consumer. That’s unique. … A chef can taste something and really think about the people who are going to eat it, and understand how those consumers are going to react, what they’re going to think about it. To really get inside the minds of [their customers] … that’s something unique that a chef brings that scientists can’t do.

Although modernists portray reliance on the chef’s personal, embodied senses as a liability in many contexts, there is no substitute for this expertise when it comes to the all-important task of evaluating the quality of a finished dish.

Science as a tool for creativity

Finally, among modernists defending their movement from charges that science makes cooking more mechanistic and impersonal, one common refrain is that science actually makes chefs more creative. Contrary to accusations that modernist cuisine has stripped the art out of cooking, many chefs with whom I spoke explicitly characterized their use of science as an aid to achieving their creative goals. For example, when asked if he was concerned that science-based cooking has reduced a chef’s creative freedom, one research chef replied:

I would argue that it allows you to be more creative, because you have a better understanding. The more you understand your medium, the better you can leverage ingredients, techniques, tools, whatever it is, to ultimately have more creativity. … I’m not trying to live in a world where we box everything up and make it very very mechanical or industrial or institutionalized. I want all of these things for my industry because I want chefs to ultimately be more creative, and I want to be able to push the envelope.

Some chefs in charge of restaurant kitchens argued that, by simplifying many mundane kitchen tasks, science-based innovations have given them additional time to worry about ‘more important things’ like dish composition or menu development (i.e., creative work). Others – often consultants and research chefs removed from the daily concerns of the restaurant – emphasized that by providing a higher level of control over the cooking process, science-based cooking allows the manipulation of new variables, thus expanding the chef’s set of potential creative actions. Culinary consultant Bouzari used sous-vide cooking to illustrate this point. Although critics of this technique often claim that it reduces cooking to a matter of mindless button-pushing (e.g., Ramsden, 2013), Bouzari argues that the technique’s accuracy and control provide chefs with an array of new creative opportunities:

When sous vide first came out as a technique … everybody was like, ok, what’s the temperature for a chicken breast? Well, what’s crazy is that there is no temperature for chicken breast. It’s a combination of temperature and time. So you can start from down to, like 145 Fahrenheit, all the way up to 170 Fahrenheit, and as long as you cook it at a proper temperature and time combination, you can make it safe. So now you have this wide palette of different textures and profiles of how you want this chicken to be cooked. And you have to figure out how you want to execute that, how you’re going to flavor it, how you’re going to incorporate it into a dish, and all these sorts of things. So while putting the chicken in the thing and pressing a button may be simpler than putting it in a pan and taking it out, really the genius of being a chef has not changed at all.

Rather than transform the process of cooking into a simple set of evidence-based rules and ‘best practices,’ modernists argue that the added control and understanding they gain from their adoption of science have expanded the creative possibilities available to them. Far from restricting the chef’s creative freedom, science here is characterized as a tool to enhance the chef’s all-important capacity for personal expression.

Conclusion: Walking the line between art and science

By adopting scientific knowledge and methods to pursue their creative goals, the modernist cuisine movement has positioned itself in a unique space within the culinary arts. Because it was initially adopted by avant-garde chefs, science’s use in fine dining is often associated with experimental dishes that dramatically transform conventional ingredients and defy diner expectations. But as the movement has matured, modernist cuisine’s ‘science-based’ practices have been embraced by a much wider range of culinary producers, who have come to view this approach as a superior means of culinary creation for a whole range of cooking styles. In portraying modernist cuisine as a reliable, evidence-based, and objective alternative to the often imprecise, tradition-bound, and subjective methods of culinary convention, the movement’s advocates draw a sharp distinction between ‘science-based’ and traditional cooking, and invoke scientific authority to assert the validity of their culinary knowledge claims.

But allusions to scientific evidence and objectivity come with certain challenges in the culinary field, where subjective judgement is not regarded as an impurity to be eradicated, but instead as a skill to be celebrated. By employing classically ‘scientific’ attributes like skepticism and objectivity to characterize and legitimate their process of discovery, modernist chefs risk undermining their own autonomy as artists. (Once the ‘perfect’ way to cook a dish has been identified, after all, any deviation from this method is by definition suboptimal.) And because scientific knowledge and methods are often regarded as antithetical to the aesthetic considerations of artists, those who employ science for creative ends are likely to face accusations that their actions lack authenticity. Modernists address these issues through a separate set of rhetorical points that emphasize the movement’s ties to the larger culinary field. Here, chefs are careful to note that science-based cooking is always employed in the pursuit of traditional culinary goals, and objective, science-based evidence may still be superseded by the chef’s personal aesthetic judgement.

These findings build upon existing research on the representational strategies of scientific communities, demonstrating how similar tactics may be employed in other knowledge contexts. While previous work has demonstrated that the ‘essential tension’ between pursuing safe but low-impact traditional work or riskier innovations is felt by participants in scientific and creative fields alike (Kuhn, 1977; Lane, 2014; Leschziner, 2015), Mody (2014) argues that the originality of a given discovery is rarely self-evident. This affords scientists the freedom to present their work in various ways, depending on their specific goals. The modernist cuisine movement has employed a similar strategy for introducing science-based cooking to the culinary field. Where emphasizing the novelty of their approach and discoveries has earned the movement the attention of innovation-minded chefs, tradition-leaning producers may see little benefit to these techniques in their own work. But by specifically highlighting the ways in which science-based cooking can aid in the pursuit of traditional culinary goals, the modernist movement broadens its appeal while bolstering the legitimacy of its (previously) unorthodox practices.

A closer look at the specific instances in which modernists invoke these distinct repertoires also reveals new insights into how scientific knowledge, practices, and values may be adopted within the context of explicitly creative fields. Just as Mitroff (1974) finds that scientists acknowledge that certain ‘counter-norms’ (such as subjectivity and secrecy) are useful and appropriate in certain contexts, it seems clear that the modernist tendency to problematize subjectivity at some times and celebrate it at others follows a certain pattern that reflects a set of nuanced and context-specific values. For the executive chef developing new dishes and menus, the subjectivity of aesthetic judgement is precisely what lends his food the personal ‘point-of-view’ that audiences have come to expect. But for the line cooks tasked with executing these dishes in a uniform way, variation in each producer’s embodied sense of taste poses a serious obstacle to this goal. And while modernists commonly praised the movement’s culture of organized skepticism, respondents’ examples suggest that such iconoclasm is best left to times explicitly reserved for research and experimentation. When producing food for paying customers, kitchen staff are still expected to hew carefully to the instructions provided by their head chef.

Here, modernist cuisine’s radical embrace of science actually reinforces a very traditional division of labor between executive chefs and their kitchen staff. This division in many ways resembles that which can be found in a number of scientific contexts. Just as scientists commonly rely on tacitly skilled technicians to conduct the ‘hands-on’ work of their research, the executive chef’s creative decisions must be precisely executed by a staff of technically adept culinary professionals. Like the ‘invisible technicians’ who receive little or no formal credit for their contributions (Shapin, 1989), these lower-level cooks conduct their work almost entirely in the shadow of the executive chef (Leschziner, 2015). And where lab technicians may emphasize their tacit or creative expertise to assert their value (Doing, 2004; Wylie, 2015), so too do lower-level cooks take pride in the considerable amount of embodied skill typically required to do their work (Fine, 1996). But in their adoption of new objective measures and equipment, modernists explicitly seek to reduce dependence on such tacit skills. By constraining the role of subjective judgement among lower-level staff while steadfastly maintaining its importance in the creative work of executive chefs, the modernist movement’s context-specific use of science effectively fortifies the already pronounced boundaries between these kitchen roles.

Finally, modernist cuisine’s balancing act between art and science also provides new insight into the power and limits of scientific authority. The STS literature offers a range of cases demonstrating how scientific authority has served to legitimate action and secure professional jurisdiction in domains as diverse as environmental policy (Marlor, 2010), finance (MacKenzie and Spears, 2014), and public health (Wynne, 1992). But although creative fields – where subjectivity, emotion, and personal taste are explicitly valorized – are uniquely positioned to resist ‘science-backed’ claims, little research has examined attempts to invoke scientific authority by producers in these contexts. As we see in the case of modernist cuisine, the results are mixed: while the movement’s growth and inroads at prominent culinary schools strongly suggest that the larger field has begun to take the idea of science-based cooking seriously, modernist respondents also widely acknowledged science’s inability to replace several aspects of traditional culinary expertise. In asserting the chef’s superior capacities for conceiving of and evaluating dishes, modernists ensure that science’s authority within the culinary field remains secondary to that of the chef himself.

Footnotes

Appendix 1 Acknowledgements

I first wish to thank the participants who generously shared their time, experiences, opinions, and food. Without them, this project would not have been possible. I am also grateful to James Evans for his suggestions on an earlier draft, and to three anonymous reviewers, whose incisive feedback improved this article immeasurably. John Levi Martin and Karin Knorr Cetina have provided invaluable guidance since this project’s inception, and it was Peter Bearman who lent me the term ‘evidence-based creativity.’

Funding

This research was supported by a dissertation year fellowship from the Visiting Committee of the University of Chicago’s Social Science Division.

Notes

Author biography

Chad Borkenhagen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. His dissertation explores the social consequences of adopting scientific knowledge in the traditionally ‘non-scientific’ fields of finance and the culinary arts. His research interests include knowledge, organizations, culture, creativity and technology.

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