“The problem with Super Bowl snacks,” Brandon Keim writes for Wired, “is that they're boring.” So instead of popping open a bag of Chex Mix and calling it a party this Sunday, take a culinary cue from a few molecular gastronomists Keim consulted. His suggested list of adventurous treats for the big game includes recipes for pizza pebbles, puffed sauerkraut, bratwurst puree, and beer ice cream in a pretzel crust.

The past 100 years have seen a dramatic evolution in the world of cuisine and cooking, from traditional techniques to canned goods and space food to nouvelle cuisine (think big plates and tiny food). A current trend is molecular gastronomy, a combination of science and cooking where chefs use chemicals and special equipment to change the physical properties of food.

An essay in The Smart Set addresses the intriguing question, Is this type of cuisine contemporary art? Of course, food is meant to be eaten. But on the other hand, both contemporary art and molecular gastronomy experiment with form and tradition, often eschewing both just because they can.

And, like contemporary art, molecular gastronomy is not for everyone. One of the essay’s profiled chefs has created a dish called “Kellogg’s paella,” a mix of shrimp heads, vanilla mashed potatoes, and Rice Krispies.

Alinea, perhaps the most famous U.S. restaurant practicing the craft, recently released a cookbook with recipes like “Pheasant, shallot, cider, burning oak leaves,” which calls for ingredients like “8 narrow oak twigs with dead leaves attached” and agar agar.

The question of molecular gastronomy as art is ultimately unanswerable, since “there is something poetic and ephemeral about deliciousness," write Morgan Meis and Stefany Anne Golberg. "We don't want that property to be reduced completely to synapses and chemical reactions. Yet through a better understanding of synapses and chemical reactions, molecular gastronomists are creating poetry.”

Image courtesy of Zesmerelda, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sitting on their hairy haunches, peering into a rousing fire, a pair of newly-evolved humans named Ugg and Ook munch thoughtfully on the raw flesh of a recent kill. Ugg accidentally drops a nugget of flesh into the fire, and grabs it as quickly as he can:

“Hey, Ook,” Ugg calls out to his dining companion. “This burnt meat actually tastes pretty good.”

“It’s good, yeah,” Ook says. “But what would you think about adding some cilantro salsa or a nice mango chutney? Maybe you could serve a little bit of red wine to wash it down?”

Since humanity’s first, stumbling attempts at cookery, people have been chemically altering food. Lately, a new branch of food preparation—known by the pretentious moniker “molecular gastronomy”—has begun to baffle and amuse diners with foodstuffs like fried mayonnaise, knotted foie gras, and foam. Writing for Discover Bruno Maddox explains that molecular gastronomy is the logical next step in the long relationship between cooking and science. In fact, cavemen like Ugg and Ook started to experiment with a kind of molecular gastronomy thousands of years ago.

“It’s a point so obvious one feels silly making it,” Maddox writes. “The relationship of cooking to Science is the same as that of engineering to Science: an intimacy that approaches identity.”

Molecular gastronomy simply pushes the envelope a little bit. Even when the food—all decked out in foam and gimmicks—doesn’t taste especially good, it’s something new. For all its pretentiousness, Maddox hopes that molecular gastronomy will make us think about our food in new ways, and continue Ook and Ugg’s important work.

—Brendan Mackie