The Science of Cooking

Response to: "At Harvard, the Kitchen as Lab" by KENNETH CHANG
Published: October 19, 2010. The New York Times online.

I am loving the New York Times education page! I will move off of it soon, but I have missed quite a few blog entries and need to catch up, so some of them should be just for fun.

This article is about a Harvard professor who has created a class in food science. I have totally had this idea before! I like cooking, but more than cooking I like the idea of cooking and the process of discovering the properties of food. I actually just picked up a book called The Foodie Handbook: The (Almost) Definitive Guide to Gastronomy by Pim Techamuanvivit. The more I learn about cooking the more I realize how many chemical and physical properties are made manifest through the process.

In terms of education, I think that this article demonstrates how good creative teaching can excite students and make accessible subjects like physics and chemistry that are typically very daunting. I have always said that if I were to teach at Hogwarts I would want to teach a class like this or botany through planting things or the science of burning things - all activities I enjoy. I truly believe that bringing the kinds of intellectual curiosity and freedom offered at the university level down to the level of K-12 would help to make students love school more as well as to inspire and attract a different caliber of teachers. I had a conversation with my physical therapist, who is an avid news follower hailing from England. An older gentleman, he described a time and place in which "there were Oxford and Cambridge graduates teaching eight-year-olds". Perhaps if the classroom environment were more academic we could attract more academic minds.