Seen from the point of view of physics, the empirical world of cooking and gastronomy is a new promising territory for the application of state-of-the-art concepts and methodologies from the physical sciences. Gastrophysics may not only transform our study of this empirical world into new science but at the same time it may revitalize the physics of the kind of soft matter that foodstuff is made of. Gastronomy could well be a source of inspiration for posing new and interesting physics problems.
Seen from the point of view of gastronomy, gastrophysics may potentially lead to new fundamental insights that can be translated into a more scientifically inspired approach to gastronomy, without removing any of the craft, creativity, and art so characteristic of cooking.
In the same way as biology provides a focusing lens for the field of biophysics, gastronomy becomes the source of inspiration for gastrophysics. In particular, gastrophysics aims to exploit, on all relevant time- and length-scales, recent advances in the physical sciences to advance the scientific study of food, the raw materials, the effects of processing food, and quantitative aspects of the physical basis for food quality, flavor, appreciation and adsorption in the human body.
Thus write Ole G. Mouritsen and Jens Risbo in their article "Gastrophysics - do we need it?", published in Flavour 2013, 2:3.
Today, Dr. Mouritsen is a Professor of Gastrophysics and Food Innovation at the University of Copenhagen. The video on this page is his inaugural lecture held on August 14th, 2017.
From this page, you can download a copy of The Emerging Science of Gastrophysics, a selection of articles published in Flavour in 2013 and republished by Taste for Life in 2015.
Mentioned in the article
Dr Ole G. Mouritsen is the head of centre in Taste for Life and head of the Gastrophysics focus area. He is a professor in Gastrophysics and Food Innovation at the Department of Food Science, University of Copenhagen.
He is an expert in bio- and gastrophysics with a special focus on mediation of the natural sciences to the general population through knowledge about food and taste.