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 experiment.
A béarnaise is precision work. The emulsion holds or it breaks. The window is narrow. Too cold and the yolks won’t thicken. Too hot and they scramble. A lab tech titrating a buffer faces the same constraints. The béarnaise tastes better.
Heat moves food from dangerous to safe. That is physics. Thermal energy denatures proteins, ruptures cell walls, crashes pathogen populations. 165 degrees in a chicken thigh is not folk wisdom. It’s the temperature at which salmonella dies. A meat thermometer is a scientific instrument. You are using it as one.
We are all scientists. Some of us went to graduate school and some of us learned at a grandmother’s elbow. The methodological gap is smaller than the credentialed class admits. Hypothesis: this stew needs more salt. Test: taste it. Adjust. Repeat. That is the scientific method, conducted with a wooden spoon.
Sharing a recipe is sharing a method. Recipes are peer-reviewed by every cook who tries them. The annotations in the margins of a stained cookbook (use less garlic, the oven runs hot, double the lemon) are post-publication corrections. Recipes live or die on replication. They replicate or fail on whether they describe reality.
I am not the first to make this argument. Brillat-Savarin made it in 1825 in The Physiology of Taste. Harold McGee made it definitively in 1984 with On Food and Cooking, the reference every serious cook owns because it explains why eggs do what they do. Hervé This invented molecular gastronomy to put cooking under a microscope. Shirley Corriher’s CookWise is a chemistry textbook with dinner menus. Alton Brown built a television career on it. J. Kenji López-Alt has run two decades of cooking experiments at Serious Eats with the patience of a man writing his thesis. Samin Nosrat reduced the whole enterprise to four principles (salt, fat, acid, heat) and won a Peabody for the Netflix series.
The argument is old. It is being made again because it needs to be. A government that fires scientists by email has decided knowledge is the enemy. Knowledge is not the enemy. Knowledge is dinner.
Cooking is one of the few places where the average person still practices empirical inquiry every day without calling it that. It is a way of insisting (in a small, domestic, edible way) that reality has rules, that the rules can be learned, and that learning them produces something good. A loaf of bread. A roast chicken. A béarnaise that holds.
That is the position the administration is attacking. This is what I am writing in defense of.
Tomorrow Senator Rick Scott of Florida. One of the wealthiest members of Congress. Built his fortune running Columbia/HCA, then the largest for-profit hospital chain in the country, and the defendant in what was then the largest healthcare fraud case in American history. The company pleaded guilty to 14 felonies. $1.7 billion in fines. Inflated Medicare bills. Exaggerated diagnoses. Kickbacks to doctors for patient referrals. Scott resigned in 1997, four months into the federal investigation, and walked with a package worth roughly $300 million. He pleaded the Fifth 75 times in a related deposition. He was never charged.
Then he got elected governor. Then he got elected senator.
Wednesday I want to talk about pizza.
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