Who Should Win a Nobel Prize? Food People, That's Who
If you've been following the news lately, you've likely noticed that it's Nobel Prize season—the big prizes have already gone out for physics, chemistry, medicine, and we're still waiting on the awards for literature, economics, and peace. And as usual, the prizes have gone out to really smart folks with multiple advanced degrees. But, like, where are the food people?
Food makes the world a better place! The people responsible for creating it deserve some serious credit! So, herewith, our food-world nominees for the Nobel Prize in each and every category.
Joshua Bousel / Flickr1/16Physics: Aaron Franklin
Back in 2009, pitmaster Aaron Franklin discovered a new natural law: Really, really good barbecue generates gravity on the order of a small black hole. How else to explain the lines that seemed to coalesce out of nothing, first at his humble, highway-side trailer, and later in Austin proper? Of course, the man has barbecue down to a science—a day-long, meat-into-the-smoker-at-2-a.m. kind of science—and his brisket's got the awesomely formed smoke rings to prove it. Hell, he even has his own PBS-backed YouTube 'cue how-to series to back it up. Watch out, Neil deGrasse Tyson!
Matt Duckor2/16Physics: Dave Arnold
He's the mad scientist chef-cum-bartender mastermind behind the Momofuku's empire's wildly popular envelope-pushing bar, Booker & Dax, where drinks are regularly made with blow torches and dry ice. When he's not coming up with new ways to use a puffing gun in his Manhattan Chinatown lab, he's busy heading the Culinary Technology department at the International Culinary Center and tirelessly working to get the Museum of Food and Drink off the ground.
cronicagastronomia / Flickr3/16Chemistry: Ferran Adrià
If you've ever eaten foam (the food kind) or felt a spherified something-or-other explode in your mouth, it's thanks to this French-bulldog-loving Catalan chef. His legendary restaurant, elBulli, was for years the world epicenter of molecular gastronomy, and its mind-bending dishes have inspired media pilgrimages, movies, tasting menus by other chefs, and even museums.
Courtesy of Chemex4/16Chemistry: Peter Schlumbohm, Inventor of the Chemex
We wouldn't do caffeine-obsessed America proud if we didn't include the German responsible for creating the coffee geek's pour-over holy grail. He invented the Chemex more than 70 years ago, in 1941, and although he isn't alive to see its mass popularity today (Schlumbohm died in 1962, making him ineligible for a Nobel, but whatever), he'd probably be thrilled to see that it still remains largely unchanged in design and function. Oh, and that it's on permanent display at the MOMA.
5/16Chemistry: Mark Post, Inventor of Lab-Made Beef
Did you know that a hamburger contains 60 billion cells? Dutch scientist Mark Post certainly did (sure helps to be a tissue engineer), and he's managed to create a better version of it, scientifically speaking. But while the first flavor test of his two-year-old, $325,000 lab-grown beef didn't exactly garner rave reviews (tasters called the flavor "close to meat"), it certainly still looks like meat and has actual nutrients to boot. So yeah, we think this is a huge step toward alleviating global food crises in a very sustainable, cruelty-free way, and so here he is.
DANIEL KRIEGER PHOTOGRAPHY6/16Medicine: Jim Meehan
Meehan is the head honcho at Please Don't Tell, the New York food industry's favorite bar-in-a-phone-booth speakeasy. His innovative cocktails and dedication to the ideally balanced boozy drink have him busy writing cocktail-making how-tos and consulting for far-flung bar programs (like the one at Austin's Midnight Cowboy), but we're also big fans of him because he managed to somehow avoid the madness of Twitter until just earlier this year.
7/16Medicine: Charles Joly
He's the bar director of Chicago chef Grant Achatz's boundary-breaking bar The Aviary in Chicago, where he regularly works to infuse his classic cocktail-making style with the Alinea aesthetic to come up with accessible yet insanely cool drinks like the Midnight Mary 2, a drink featuring galangal syrup and flash-frozen basil foam (!). But we also like that he's co-founded of a line of bottled cocktails—by the way, it's called Crafthouse, just in case you wanted a portable version of your favorite (alcoholic) medicine.
Courtesy of JJ Goode8/16Literature: JJ Goode
This man is the largely unrecognized super co-writer of some of the most popular chef cookbooks to have come out in the past few years, including April Bloomfield's A Girl and Her Pig, Masaharu Morimoto's The New Art of Japanese Cooking, and Andy Ricker's forthcoming Pok Pok cookbook. We hear he's a pretty nice guy, too.
Renee Suen / Flickr9/16Literature: Nathan Myhrvold
While Ferran Adrià pioneered molecular gastronomy, Nathan Myhrvold codified it—epically—in his five-piece cookbook set, Modernist Cuisine. With enormous photos, enormous amounts of rave reviews (David Chang has called it the “The cookbook to end all cookbooks”), and an even more enormous price tag (currently $377 on Amazon), it was an undertaking of whose ambitions Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner would surely approve.
10/16Literature: Anthony Bourdain
America's favorite bad boy chef turned TV host is now making a comfortable living judging home cooks on ABC's The Taste and eating around the world for CNN's Parts Unknown, but we remember the days when he was penning gritty tell-alls about the cocaine-fueled 1980s restaurant world and the gross habits NYC diners should watch out for—remember that thing about restaurants straining cigarette ash out of table butter in order to use it for brunchtime béarnaise sauce?
Achatz: WikiMedia Commons, Kokonas: Catfisheye / Flickr11/16Economics: Grant Achatz / Nick Kokonas
This Windy City dream team revolutionized the restaurant reservation system back in 2011 when they introduced the ticketing system as part of their super-ambitious Next. Instead of being able to call in to get a reservation, people simply went to a website to purchase tickets (get it?) for the prix-fixe dinner for that particular season. In getting diners to prepay, Achatz and Kokonas greatly reduced the number of diner no-shows and inadvertently created a potential solution to 2013's controversial tipping issue.
Financial Times Photos / Flickr12/16Economics: Felix Salmon
Reuters' financial blogger may not write about food all the time, but when he does, it's insightful and well-researched. Back in 2011, for example, he examined the the microeconomics of restaurant letter grades, and the real value of dining out. Most recently, he created a fun price/quality index chart of all the restaurants on the San Pellegrino Top 50 Restaurants list, and found out that despite some pretty out-there pricing, the world of restaurants is pretty democratic.
gomattolson / Flickr13/16Economics: Naomichi Yasuda, Shige Akimoto and Scott Rosenberg, Founders of Sushi Yasuda
In the aftermath of the Tipping Controversy of Summer 2013, Sushi Yasuda did away with the silly American tradition of tipping. Instead they increased prices by 15 percent, and even refused tips from patrons who tried give cash after paying with a credit card. In the end, customers didn't mind—and the owners even inadvertently made a few extra bucks off the ones who decided to pay for the whole meal in cash.
Javier Sirvent14/16Peace: René Redzepi
In addition to being a calming Scandinavian presence in the shouty, over-competitive chef world, Noma chef-owner and MAD Symposium founder René Redzepi has unified chefs looking to just be better at what they do, by encouraging them to bring cooking back to the basics, but with an innovative twist. Like, even before there was organized farming: One of the main reasons for Redzepi's influence is his obsessive dedication to foraging for ingredients growing in the natural surroundings of his native Copenhagen.**
Courtesy of Dominique Ansel15/16Peace: Dominique Ansel
For a few brief months this summer, the creator of the Cronut™ (RIP) united the world with his mashup pastry. At the height of the craze, nearly everyone in New York, America, and the rest of the world held an opinion on its flavor, its origin, the lines it generated, and the hype itself. (Rival chefs, meanwhile, wondered, "Why the hell didn't I think of that first?") Although the unity eventually split into pro-Cro and anti-Nut factions, Ansel's achievement deserves to be honored with a Nobel—for which we insist he wait in line three or four hours to receive.
David Sifry / Flickr16/16Peace: Alice Waters
The OG of farm-to-table dining for more than 40 years, Alice Waters originally made waves as one of the first champions for organic eating, first with Chez Panisse and then by founding the Edible Schoolyard Project back in 1995. On a smaller but no less important scale, she's also cultivated a coterie of close relationships with her chefs and providers—a family that has come together in times of crisis and works to improve food in far-flung places like Cuba. If that's not deserving of a Peace Prize, we don't know what is.
