I write about the chemistry of food and cooking. I took up this odd vocation after studies at the California Institute of Technology and at Yale University, where I wrote a doctoral thesis with the prophetic title "Keats and the Progress of Taste." After several years as a literature and writing instructor at Yale, I decided to practice what I'd been teaching, and write a book: a book about the science of everyday life.

The result was the publication in 1984 of On Food & Cooking: The Science & Lore of the Kitchen, a 680-page compendium that brought feature articles in Time and People Magazines and won the Andre Simon Memorial Fund Book Award in Britain. My timing was lucky: America and Britain were awakening to the pleasures of good food and to the diversity of world cuisines, and On Food & Cooking helped satisfy the growing hunger for information about ingredients and techniques.

Six years after On Food & Cooking, in 1990, I published a shorter and more personal book, The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore. In the first chapters, I narrate my efforts to solve a variety of kitchen puzzles. (How much oil can you emulsify into a mayonnaise with one egg yolk? Gallons. Why does frying spatter end up on the inside surface of the cook’s eyeglasses? Gravity.) I then go in search of the solid principles that underlie the ever-changing scientific evidence linking diet and the major scourges of later life, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. And I conclude with reflections about the great gastronomical writer Brillat-Savarin and about the fundamental nature and appeal of cooked foods.

In 2004, after working on it for ten years, I published the second, completely revised edition of On Food & Cooking , which won several awards. Along the way I've contributed reviews and original research to the scientific journal Nature, and have written articles for many publications, including The New York Times, The World Book Encyclopedia, The Art of Eating, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, and Physics Today. I've talked about food chemistry at the Culinary Institute of America and other professional schools, at Madrid Fusion, at universities, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Chemical Society. I've appeared on CNN, the National Geographic channel, and the public TV series "Diary of a Foodie"; and on National Public Radio’s "All Things Considered," "Fresh Air," and "Science Friday." In 1995 I was elected to the James Beard Foundation's Who's Who in American Food, and in 2005 Bon Appetit magazine named me food writer of the year. 

I'm currently working on several book projects, and writing an occasional column on science and food  for the New York Times.