About

I cooked and worked in wine before becoming a biochemist. I still cook. My day job is in genetic code expansion and engineered fermentation, the part of biology where flavour and sensation are being engineered.

This site hosts long essays on flavour, sense and biochemistry in food and drink. The subject of any one essay might be an apple variety, a wine compound, a fermentation, the way sound and weight and the room around you change what your tongue is doing, the strange biography of a single molecule. Each essay tries to hold the chemistry and the experience in the same paragraph. There is no argument here against the inherited line between natural and synthetic; that argument is by now small. There is, instead, a claim that what we eat and drink, looked at closely, is more contingent and more interesting than either the natural/synthetic frame or the supermarket frame can let it be. The close looking is itself the pleasure.