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Is it possible to maintain that cookery has a philosophical pertinence without merely appending philosophy to our burgeoning gastroculture? How might the everyday sense of the culinary be expanded into a culinary materialism wherein synthesis, experimentation, and operations of mixing and blending take precedence over analysis, subtraction and axiomatisation? Drawing on resources ranging from anthropology to chemistry, from hermetic alchemy to contemporary mathematics, this volume undertakes a trans-modal experiment in culinary thinking, excavating the cultural, industrial, physiological, chemical and even cosmic grounds of cookery, and proposing new models of culinary thought for the future.

Published in 2006.

Editorial introduction -- The chemical paradigm (interview) -- Corn bomb: an extended history of nitrogen -- Whey to go: on the hominid appropriation of the pig-function -- The new alimentary continuum -- Vague weaponizations, or the chemistry of para-tactical engagements -- Food and the City -- Where's the edge of the pot? (Interview) -- Object-oriented cookery -- Reason in the roasting of eggs -- Theorizing cuisine from medieval to modern times: cognitive structures, the biology of taste, and culinary conventions -- The human sensoria and a synaesthetic approach to cooking -- Black cake (a recipe for Emily Dickinson, for Emily Dickinson) -- Ec[h]ologies of the désêtre -- The metaphysics of predation -- Spiritual meat: resurrection and religious horror in Bataille -- Ex-nihilo: forming a body out of nothing -- Analytical jelly and transmodern tatin -- On philosophical alchimery, or why all chimeric compositions are philosophical stones.