The new revolution in cooking can be viewed in two ways. One is that you can take any traditional food and apply modern techniques. The other approach is to create food that is quite different than anything that has existed before.

One of the problems with posing a 'bold new plan' is that you can't just extrapolate from previous plans.

I was good at math and science, and I got lots of degrees in lots of things, but in a parallel universe, I probably became a chef.

When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.'

I've been on a team that won the world championship of barbecue. But barbecue's interesting, because it's one of these cult foods like chili, or bouillabaisse. Various parts of the world will have a cult food that people get enormously attached to - there's tremendous traditions; there's secrecy.

A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA.

Three things about water affect almost all of cooking. First are the hydrogen bonds, which is why it has an incredibly high boiling point. Another is that it's a polar molecule, so that it dissolves a lot of things, and there are things that won't mix with it. And then there's how much energy it takes to heat water.