How Much should Science affect in the Kitchen?
It often happens that some of my materials taken from this blog, ti is quoted in discussions concerning the reasons behind a cooking behavior or a technique used. Quite normal: one of the features that most distinguishes my publications, I believe it is to provide several fronts to analyze the issue, an analytical photograph of the situation if you mean it, rather than a set of guidelines to follow. Sometimes it happens however that the discussion is taken on with a strong orientation to this “scientific” leaning in vogue in the barbecue world at the moment, or the tendency to try to rediscover and reinterpret everything at any cost through a formula or a molecular breakdown. I confess to you: in these cases I tend to never intervene. I consider it completely useless and the reasons are basically two:
- In discussions with the “scientists” the latter end up being even more Taliban in their convictions than any “traditionalist” antagonists they use to denigrate so much and there is no discussion without ending with parrot-repeating phrases like “It’s not about me, it is the science that says it! “rejecting in advance any deepening because”It is written there!“. The mechanism is the same seen by the No-Vax.
- I find the assumptions of these discussions extremely naive and totally detached from real life.
Anyway, I do not consider myself a “traditionalist” or a “scientific” but an “agnostic” and I think it is the only common sense attitude that we should be allowed to have in an age where it is too much easy to believe that you really live in “googland”. But obviously common sense does not belong to the days we are living.
Let’s clarify the terms so we understand each other better:
The representatives of the extremity to the left of the spectrum, those who have N mountains of ash behind them, or the supporters of the fact that experience is the main engine of knowledge, could be defined as Empirical
Empiricism: “philosophical current according to which human knowledge derives exclusively from the senses and experience”
The other side of the spectrum, that of “scientists” is more difficult to circumscribe but theoretically
Scientific method: “traditional conception of progress in science through theories and their demonstration”
Ok, but how?
As Scientific Method we should mean the so-called Galilean method, or
Experimental Method: “formulation of a theory with an innovative character based on empirical data, to be examined through a sufficient series of rigorous demonstrations”
What is on the net and is called “science” is a principle that “makes the theory and descriptive models precede the object that these models and theories should describe. Around the hypotheses new interpretative theories are constructed and if a theory is not entirely substantiated by facts, instead of replacing it with a more suitable one, it is simply “revised” by incorporating the exception.
The result is that, in general, this “science” no longer seeks the truth of the facts and the most suitable models to describe them, but ends up being an instrument to demonstrate the veracity of pre-packaged theses“(as a “scientific” would say, this is said by Sabato Scala, not by me! 😉 )
In other words, a thesis is not based on the available informations but only informations useful to support their thesis are disclosed.
Guys, let’s get back in touch with reality:
Googland does not exist.
That “secret” information, which no one knows and which is revealed to you by an enlightening post on amazingribs, magically moving you from the ignorant people to pedants, does not exist.
Real life is a little more complicated than this. Do you really believe you are in a position to say “study!” to those who have read, how many? 2, 5, 10 articles on Facebook less than you?
Do you really think you can fully understand the dynamics of chemistry, medicine, physics illustrated briefly “for dummies” in a few lines of alleged demonstration, at the same level as those who may have spent years at university on it?
Just so you understand. Information is available at 3 levels: data, data analysis and analysis sharing.
Concrete example:
. Guy1 drove the car at 80 per hour
. Guy2 says the limit was 50. THEN Guy1 is a murdering pirate, while Guy3 says that Guy1 was going to the hospital for an urgency, he had the blinker on and he was signaling himself as correctly foreseen by the driving code, THEN Guy1 is a conscientious and prudent citizen.
. The Dummy on duty who does not have a license, barely knows what a car is and what the driving rulesare, posts “Guy1 is a murderer. Inform yourself, ignorant! “==> link to the article by Guy2.
The Point is: the possible understanding of information on complex topics that involve several disciplines, for most of us starts from the access to the second level, or much more frequently to the third. Otherwise it is necessary to have sufficient skills in chemistry, physics and medicine to analyze pure data and make an our own analysis.
I am not able to do it for sure and as I said I’m used to act as an agnostic.
Agnostic: “conceptual method by which judgment is suspended regarding a problem, since there is not enough knowledge of it”
So I start from the only possible assumption: knowledge is the experience made growing on the trellis of education.
I read as much as possible, I get ideas and then cross them and filter through a considerable empirical experience. On this experience I formulate my own orientation, which I do not allow myself to state as absolute rule.
Read any of my articles. Take for example the article on the real and perceived dangerousness of Nitrites in cold smoking: it’s damn long, consider many aspects and many, too many are still missing. I will only provide as much information as possible so that everyone can build their own trellis as they wish. It’s clear that it would be easier to omit 50% of it to make certain statements appear more true and make accessibility to my publications more simple by giving people what they want, but in all Consciousness it is not what I want.
If you were looking from me an absolute certainty and you like to mislead yourself that it exists, unfortunately you will not find it in what I write and in my pages. That’s it.
If, on the other hand, you like to work to create that informational tellis on which to grow your knowledge by developing experience, here you will certainly find and will keep on finding lot of material at your disposal, in addition to all the help I will be able to support.
