“For your 50th wedding anniversary, you will be given a once-in-a-lifetime dinner honoring you and your spouse. You are asked to choose who will prepare the meal: a team of America's greatest chefs or a team of America's best food scientists?”
In a room of over 100 professional product developers and food scientists, you could have heard a pin drop. Of course, it was only a rhetorical question beginning the presentation, but it brought to mind an age-old debate. Is a food item best developed in a food science lab? Or, perhaps it is best created in a traditional culinary kitchen? What are the advantages of each, and what are the disadvantages? This month, Prepared Foods talked with some of America's most prominent food developers to ask their opinion on this hot food topic.