Freakonomics on food, part II, or Where have you gone, Don King?

Breaking this into two posts, but the aforementioned Freakonomics on food thing also included a lazy, half-assed digression that is worth savoring all by itself:

In many ways, Myhrvold’s approach is the opposite of the “slow food” movement that has taken certain quadrants of this country by storm in recent years — at Alice Waters's famed Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, for instance. Whereas Myhrvold arms himself with a vacuum desiccator, a blowtorch and a 60,000 RPM centrifuge, Waters doesn’t even own a microwave. (In the podcast, she tells us about the time — the one time — she ate a Big Mac.) As you can probably imagine, Waters doesn’t love the idea of scientists invading the kitchen, or of molecular gastronomy:

Waters: I can’t say that I care a lot about it. I can’t say that.

SJD: And tell me why.

Waters: Because I’m trying to get back to a kind of taste of food for what it is.

SJD: And molecular gastronomy is trying to accomplish what in your view?

Waters: In my view it’s to, you know, make it into something you can’t imagine, surprise you. That’s not to say that I haven’t been delightfully surprised. It’s not that. It’s that I am so hungry for the taste of the real that I’m just not able to get into that which doesn’t feel real to me. It’s a kind of scientific experiment, and I think that there are good scientists and crazy old scientists that can be very amazing. But it’s more like a museum to me. It’s not a kind of way of eating that we need to really live on this planet together.

There is no shortage of throwing Alice under the bus -- literally almost sometimes -- around these parts, but it's sort of good to see her not take the bait. To describe molecular gastronomy and slow food as opponents is not so much wrong as unhelpful, and getting a soundbite from Waters on molecular gastronomy is almost exactly as useful as getting a soundbite from Mike Leach on the triple option. 

Also, the Times identifies Waters as "the godmother of the slow food movement," which must be surprising news for Carlo Petrini. Maybe they have Wikipedia blocked at the Times.