See Also: Home Edition of Six-Volume "Modernist Cuisine" Tome in the Works See Also: Molecular Gastronomy Meets Chicken Wings, Beer Cocktails and Other Super Bowl Pinterest Finds
White House head pastry chef Bill Yosses recently caused a conspiracy laden stir after delivering a presentation on molecular gastronomy to a crowd in Dublin, Ireland.
The story which was originally broadcast by RTE News ran under the innocuous headline, "Six One News: Scientists outline new cuisine developments." However it went from there to a strange place in short order.
The Obama Foododrama blog, which focuses on White House policies regarding food, tracked the freakish evolution of this story from yawn worthy evening news filler to a hot trending topic on several top conspiracy websites. Patient zero for this shitstorm is NaturalNews.com, who picked up the story and breathlessly ran with the shocking headline, "White House chef says future food to be made from chemicals, not real food ingredients."
Here's the original RTE broadcast:
The NaturalNews.com story was picked up by several conspiracy websites including the ever popular Prison Planet. The NaturalNews.com article makes the perfectly rational jump from a discussion about composing food ingredient by ingredient to this,
"The average person, in other words, will eventually be expected to happily eat green gelatin-like blobs made of chemical compounds, along with ambiguous cracker products that resemble "Soylent Green," while the White House and the world's other elites continue to eat wholesome, natural foods, including those hand-picked from Michelle Obama's organic garden."
That's right, molecular gastronomy isn't about discovering new flavors and textures and reassembling food in novel ways. It's about creating fake food for the masses for the plebes. That totally explains why the White House has started sending out copies of Modernist Cuisine along with food stamps and school lunches. Now to be fair they RTE did interview one of the founders of molecular gastronomy, Herve This, and This does seem to indicate that he's interested in building food from the raw chemicals up. That's probably not surprising given that he's a chemist by trade and that his work is pushing the boundaries of food science. But it does strain credulity to presume that he's doing so as part of a grand experiment... to feed poor people.
Now here's a video of Yosses making something a little less scary. A white chocolate White House... garnished with soylent green.