Is culinary art really so exact that, as Delia Smith once wrote, cooking is an exact art and not some casual game? (BQ 2012) This exact view of cooking can be contrasted with an opposing observation by Tom Jaine, when he argued that, if cooking becomes an art form rather than a means of providing a reasonable diet, then something is clearly wrong. (BQ 2012a) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), culinary art, in relation to both ingredients and techniques, is neither possible or impossible, nor desirable or undesirable, to the extent that the respective ideologues on different sides would like us to believe. Needless to say, this challenge to the opposing views of cooking does not mean that culinary art has no practical value, or that those interdisciplinary fields (related to culinary art) like food science, nutritional economics, food chemistry, food aesthetics, the ethics of killing for food, molecular gastronomy, food rheology, food photography, Shechita, the science of aphrodisiacs, and so on, are unimportant. Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Rather, this book offers an alternative, better way to understand the future of culinary art, especially in the dialectic context of ingredients and techniques-while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them or integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other. More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the inquisitive theory of culinary art) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way. If successful, this seminal project is to fundamentally change the way that we think about culinary art in relation to ingredients and techniques from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its post-human fate.
About the Author: Dr Peter Baofu is the author of 61 new theories in 53 books (as of June 2012) to provide a visionary challenge to conventional wisdom in all fields of knowledge (i.e., the social sciences, the formal sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities), with the aim for a unified theory of everything-together with numerous visions of the mind, nature, society, and culture in future history. As a polymath, he is known for his pioneering works on post-capitalism, authoritarian liberal democracy, post-democracy, inquisitive culinary art, panoramic transportation, cyclical-progressive migration, multifold history, reflective criminology, transcendent architecture, interactive semantics, transdisciplinary performing arts, interventive-reshaping geography, complex data analysis, creational chemistry, comparative-impartial literature, supersession computing, detached gambling, multilateral acoustics, metamorphic humor, heterodox education, post-human mind games, post-Earth geology, substitutive religion, post-cosmology, contrarian personality, post-ethics, multifaceted war and peace, post-humanity, critical-dialectic formal science, combinational organization, hyper-sexual body, law reconstruction, comprehensive creative thinking, hyper-martial body, multilogical learning, contingent urban planning, selective geometry, contrastive advantages, ambivalent technology, the post-post-Cold-War era, post-civilization, transformative aesthetic experience, synthetic information architecture, contrastive mathematical logic, dialectic complexity, after-postmodernity, sophisticated methodological holism, post-human space-time, existential dialectics, unfolding unconsciousness, floating consciousness, hyper-spatial consciousness, and other visions. Dr Baofu earned an entry to the list of prominent and emerging writers in Contemporary Authors (2005) and another honorary entry in The Writers Directory (2007)-and was also interviewed on television and in newspapers about his original ideas. He was a US Fulbright Scholar in the Far East. He had taught as a professor at different universities in Western Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, South Asia, North America, and Southeast Asia. He has finished more than five academic degrees, including a PhD from the world-renowned MIT, and was a summa cum laude graduate.