On Cooking the Science

My name is Remo Gisi. I graduated in theoretical computer science and distributed systems at ETH Zürich in 2012. In 2016, I co-founded the ETH spinoff company Tastelab.

Tastelab works in the intersection of food and science where we do a wide variety of projects from high-end caterings and restaurant projects to art collaborations and consulting work.

Our recent project “Cook the Science” is a collaboration initiated by Prof. Dr. Thomas Michaels, an ETH professor specialising in soft and living matter. (www.ethz.ch/cookthescience)

Designed as a free public lecture series, Cook the Science invites chefs and culinary experts to ETH to talk about their area of expertise. Each one-hour lecture features an ETH professor and a chef and focuses on one specific topic that is relevant in cooking every day. Be it caramelisation or gelation, fermentation or crystallisation: Complex chemical and biological processes build the basics for the most mundane cooking processes.

To the Cook the Science audience, one thing is immediately apparent: cooking is always applied science. Every time we are in our kitchen, we “do” physics, chemistry, biology. In our kitchen, we all have a “lab” at home, even if we don’t necessarily know it!

The context of cooking is one that we all know and can relate to. It makes scientific insights understandable and easy to apply, and once it makes our food tastier and our recipes succeed more easily, there can be no doubt that science is very relevant indeed.

In my opinion, cooking is the ideal context for science outreach and communication – and the success of the Cook the Science series seems to confirm this! Since its beginnings in fall 2024, each Cook the Science lecture was fully booked. Many of the Cook the Science guests are at ETH for the first time, which is great – and also a frequent source for either amusement or compassion when first-timers are lost in the maze of ETH main building…

In addition to the full auditorium, many thousand YouTube visitors view the Cook the Science lectures online. In a way, this makes Cook the Science one of our most influential projects to date, one where we’re not creating exclusive experiences for the select few but get to share our enthusiasm for science (and cooking!) with thousands of people from many different backgrounds.

Naturally, this is also a great motivation to go on with the Cook the Science journey! The lectures as we know them are scheduled to continue for the next couple of years. Also, we might expand Cook the Science into other formats to reach yet more people!

If you’d like to know about future Cook the Science events, follow Cook the Science on Instagram to hear the latest news and announcements.

And, of course, if you want to stay informed about Tastelab’s other adventures in the domains of cooking and science, follow us on our channels as well! (We are on Instagram and on Facebook, and we do send out Newsletters occasionally.)

I’m looking forward to meeting you at our future projects!