Some thoughts about food from Hervé This

Hervé This's Building a meal : from molecular gastronomy to culinary constructivism (New York : Columbia University Press, 2009. trans. by Malcolm DeBevoise).

I had an "eat-well" wholemeal bap of M & S for breakfast before going to work in the morning. I felt content.

We city dwellers are used to high-salt-and-high-fat fast food and junk food and we simply cannot get rid of it.

Notwithstanding we eat badly, This raises a fundamental question "what does eating badly really amount? Does it mean eating things that are bad for one's health, or merely things that are thought to be objectionable for one reason or another?"

He despises nonsense claims about the relationship between food and health and warns us to be cautious to food labelled and marketed as natural and good-for-your-health. Indeed, "we don't behave rationally when it comes to diet." (p. 78)

A few more excerpts from this interesting book: "To cook, by its very nature, is a form of technical intervention. Cooks transform nature, just as chemist transform matter." (p. 79)

"Boredom is the result not of doing the same thing over and over again, but of paying no attention to what we are doing." (p. xii)