Collapse Vol. VII: Culinary Materialism

Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism brings together work that explores, from many different perspectives, the multifaceted question of cookery. In this volume, a range of contributors – scientists, philosophers, chefs, anthropologists, artists – explore how philosophy and proto- scientific theory and experimental practice was linked at its outset to the culinary arts; and chart the consequences of the contemporary return of cookery to scientific precision, in the rarefied world of haute cuisine as in the world of mass- manufactured confections. Along the way we discover that the question of cookery is bound up with some profound and enduring issues in the history of philosophy, and can also suggest new approaches to contemporary philosophical problems.