Cover story, Wired UK Edition, Oct-12. Ferran Adria, world-famous chef, at the cover of a magazine about the innovators building a better world.
Let me first confess that I am a lousy cook but a talented eater and that I never made it to El Bulli, his world's most lauded restaurant at Costa Brava, Spain (now closed).
My favorite chefs include Pierre Gagnaire and Gordon Ramsay and probably my personal world's number one chef is Massimiliano Alajmo at Le Calandre.
Adria's genre is molecular gastronomy and his special approach to cuisine has many topics. For me deconstruction-and-reconfiguration helped to mark him out from the contemporaries. And, yes I have some of his cook books on my book shelf.
My experiences with molecular cuisine peaked at Grant Achatz' Alinea.
This is the background for my challenge:
First, it is fantastic that Adria shares his unprecedented rich knowledge as food-artist and -scientist and creator of all-new dishes and put it into a next level of abstraction, asking what has innovative cuisine in common with innovation in general.
Ok, combine science, arts, philosophy and technology as a creativity generation universe (as Adria says).
I even agree that mathematical cooking can get better results by reducing process combinatorics using knowledge from a cooking knowledge base of data and rules.
But using cuisine as a discourse in order to create a dialogue with other disciplines?
My conclusion in Mad Science - The Cooking Lab: ironically the science-driven cooking is waning. Alajmo says: there is no other truth but the one of the ingredients (or axioms, if you want).
We are nature and we want to eat nature.
Not surprisingly, the new waves in cooking come from the Fäviken Magasinet or in my country Saziani Stub'n where the 20 years old chef, Harald Irka, creates delicious but simple dishes from local ingredients with amazing tastes.
Unexpected places for avant garde cuisine. Unexpected minimalism with an amazing result.
This all does not belittle Adria's inventions and innovations. And I really look forward to his Bullipedia release.
But in search of perfection, we at UnRisk, will not forget that our scientific approaches, models and methods for a broad variety of deal types do not construct the financial world, but hopefully contribute to better insight for better risk optimal trading decisions - as result of the co-evolution of customer experiences and technology development. For better financial dishes.
