At elBulli, his famed temple of gastronomy in Spain, Ferran Adrià served spherified olive oil that burst open on your tongue. Wylie Dufresne made deep-fried mayo cubes at wd~50 in NYC, which sounds impossible unless you know the right gelling agent lets you bread a dollop and deep fry it. In Chicago, chefs working for Grant Achatz at Alinea dutifully weighed xanthan gum (one of the least exotic ingredients in their pantry) on a gram scale and hydrated it into sauces.
For a while in the early 2000s, this was the cutting edge of fine dining. Until it kinda just flamed out over the past decade. But I bring that era up because we are now in a loud, unsettled fight over ultra-processed foods and the additives in them. The industrial ingredients a small pocket of chefs and diners once treated as exciting tools for culinary fireworks are now the ones many grocery shoppers avoid like the plague.
This type of cooking had a name: molecular gastronomy. The chemist Hervé This and the physicist Nicholas Kurti coined the term at their workshops on the science of cooking, and it stuck. It’s a regrettable name that I hate, because it overemphasized the chemistry lab aspects and entirely missed the point.
The spirit of that movement had little to do with foams, gels, and spheres. The chefs who mattered were diving into the structure of food itself, re-examining long-held cooking traditions and reasoning from first principles on how to make something delicious. They studied how proteins and starches and fats actually behave, betting that a chef who understands ingredients at the molecular level can push a dish somewhere more creative than traditional techniques could. Sometimes the results were a revelation. And other times, they were a late-night, self-indulgent fusion jazz freak-out on a plate.
Restaurants Run on Vibes
The movement eventually ate itself alive, as thousands of young cooks started making spheres just to make spheres and foams just to make foams. By 2008-ish, you could order a bad melon “caviar” appetizer at almost any shitty major metropolitan hotel bar.
But it really didn’t matter. This was not food any meaningful part of the world ate for sustenance. elBulli was open six months a year and hosted about 8,000 guests per season, with a waitlist of around two million people. This was food for the one percent of the one percent. To the people in those dining rooms, these additives weren’t demonized or even celebrated. They were just curiosities.
And no one made a big stink about these gums and stabilizers because they weren’t there for the ingredients. They were there for everything else a restaurant of that caliber surrounds people with: the dining room, the service, the wine, the four and a half hour menus, the chef’s pedigree, the hype, the months-long wait, and the fact that you told everyone you were going and there was no way in hell you were going to admit it wasn’t awesome.
It’s not that the food isn’t important, but restaurants are in the vibes business, with a dozen tools to make you have a wonderful night, even if the food is just meh.
Packaged food companies have far fewer levers to pull. Often it’s just a pretty label and how the thing tastes as you eat it in your car on the way to work. You’re not being hit over the head by a sommelier and server and host and chef all colluding to make you have a great time. It’s just you and the plastic cup of mush you bought on sale at Target last week.
So it’s no wonder that words like sodium alginate, carrageenan, methylcellulose, and xanthan gum can read like poison on a food package, yet read as ambition on a tasting menu.
The Dose Defines the Poison
Two things typically determine whether one of these ingredients is a problem for someone’s body: how much is there, and why is it there. For xanthan gum, the typical effective dose is around 0.1% by weight. To thicken about 12 ounces of watery soup, you need about a third of a gram, which is like a pinch of salt’s worth.
Say you want to make a sauce from an herb like parsley or tarragon. Blanch the herb, chill it, and puree it, and the result is probably quite liquidy. You could whisk in butter for body and gloss, but now it also tastes like butter. A roux adds heft and a starchy note that dulls the green. A cornstarch slurry turns gluey as it cools. Reducing the puree concentrates the bitter flavors along with the good ones and turns the green to green-brown. Something potent like xanthan thickens it hot or cold while adding no fat or flavor, keeping the sauce tasting mostly like the herb you started with.
That doesn’t mean xanthan is always the right answer. Sometimes butter is better, sometimes a roux makes sense. And for a guest who is dairy free, gluten free, or trying to eat less cholesterol, something like xanthan can legitimately add value.
The point is, intent matters. And intent is related to context.
How Do You Measure Intent?
Many of the ingredients that became infamous in the molecular gastronomy era had been used for decades in industrial food manufacturing. I was at Chobani in the early days of the Greek yogurt boom and spent time in the factory watching milk get turned into yogurt, then put in centrifuges to strain out the whey, leaving behind the dense, tangy, protein-rich Greek yogurt that reinvigorated a then-sleepy category in the early 2010s.
This way of making Greek yogurt takes a lot of milk: about four gallons for every gallon of yogurt. The big established brands were desperate to catch up. Someone over there with a food science degree and an MBA probably did the math and saw it was a lot cheaper to thicken regular yogurt and skip the straining. So they used ingredients like xanthan, carrageenan, or milk protein concentrates to get that thick texture and slapped “Greek style yogurt” on the front.
Intent, for a big food brand, is almost always profit. It’s no surprise that big food companies find shortcuts (ahem, I mean “efficiencies”) to improve the bottom line. The spectrum runs from innocent ingredient swaps no one notices, to skipping the most important part of a recipe and building mouthfeel with powders to get “Greek style,” but not true “Greek yogurt.”
And whether a food additive is good or bad for one’s body is a different question altogether. Some pass through with no noticeable effect. Some we feel right away, and others only after prolonged use. The net effect depends on dose, frequency, genetics, environment, overall diet, and more factors that are hard to generalize.
Someone with celiac disease who eats a sandwich is almost certainly consuming a little xanthan gum, because that’s what holds gluten-free bread together. Yes, they’re eating xanthan gum. But yes, they are also eating bread, and for anyone who lives on a gluten-free diet, the mental and emotional fireworks of finding a gluten-free bread they like are immeasurable. So is xanthan gum good or bad for that person?
Context Is Everything
For all the fury people throw at big food over everyday supermarket items, fewer people protest how ultra-processed a military ration or a freeze-dried camping meal is. In those extreme situations, the technology takes center stage and feels justified. But apply the same preserving and processing to baby food and you’ve got a momfluencer-fueled social media shitstorm coming your way. The processing didn’t change, but the story around it did.
This is the challenge with blanket definitions about food. A definition aims to be absolutely consistent, yet the context and intent of the food we eat never is. Carrageenan thickening a beverage for a hospital patient who needs it is care, while the same ingredient in almond milk comes off as filler. It’s a double standard driven by context.
Back at the restaurant, this double standard is always on full display. People in the good food movement dutifully check ingredient labels and nutrition panels on everything they buy, yet in 46 years of life I’ve never witnessed a person ask a server how many grams of protein or fat are in a dish. Everyone loves to be militant about ingredients and macros until that first martini hits and the music and lighting are just right, and they order whatever they want, no questions asked. An inviting dining room creates a social frame around pleasure, and pulling out your phone to count the milligrams of sodium in your duck confit shatters that frame.
We all live in that contradiction when it comes to food, which leads to the question: can we make any all-encompassing rules about food, or does every real answer about food and health have to exist in “it depends” land?
To be clear, I’m not defending junk food. We make and eat too much of it, and it’s almost always the easiest, cheapest, most accessible choice compared to real food. That is a big problem we need to fix. But it’s hard to have one definition of junk food, because it’s not just the food, it’s the context and intent behind why, when, where, and how someone eats it.
This is where we are now in the ultra-processed food fight: looking so closely at the food that we’re forgetting everything that surrounds it. Not differentiating between an additive used for legitimate reasons and one used to mislead eaters and mask food of dubious quality. And I honestly don’t know how you score that fairly across all the food types on the market today and in the future.
Food is logic and emotion. In an industry filled with uncertainty and grey areas, this is as close to an absolute truth as I’ve gotten in 24 years. And if everything we do in food is a confluence of heart and mind, is it a fool’s errand to define something like ultra-processed food on logic alone?
I’m not sure, but it probably depends.
—
I write about the fine dining trend that replaces molecular gastronomy in the year 2040, in Mise 02: The Restaurant Issue, out now.
Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.