Why I’m Writing About Cooking

Coming this week: a hot take on "The Wine Wars," the criminal senator from Florida and PIZZA!!!

The Trump administration has terminated more than 7,800 research grants. Roughly 25,000 federal science workers are gone. The entire National Science Board (all 22 members) was fired by email. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. axed the CDC’s 17-member vaccine advisory panel in June 2025 and replaced it with cranks.

So I’m writing about cooking. Stay with me for a minute.

This is not a non sequitur. Cooking is science. Every step of it. The administration’s war on labs and journals and grant programs is a war on a way of thinking. That way of thinking did not start in labs. It started in kitchens. It belongs to anyone who has reduced a sauce or proofed a loaf.

Measuring a quarter cup of milk is mathematics. Fractions, ratios, the same arithmetic that holds up bridges. Baking is chemistry. Browning is the same nonenzymatic reaction in a cast iron pan or a flask. Louis-Camille Maillard described it in 1912. He was not doing kitchen work. The cooks who exploit his reaction every day are running his exp…