3.2.2. Courses

The interest of the scientific discipline called molecular and physical gastronomy for education in science and technology is that it focuses on the mechanisms of the phenomena that occur during culinary transformations. To train students to look for such information (that is mechanisms of phenomena, key to good science, technology and engineering, efficient product design and creative innovation), it is useful to show how to move step by step from the macroscopic description of the transformations to molecular descriptions of changes involved, via microscopy and analyses of changes at supramolecular level. At each step, quantifying the phenomena helps to select explanations among the many possible ones.

This course is given to students attending the Educational Module “Physical Chemistry for Food Structuring” of the Master’s Program “Engineering – Products - Processes”, in AgroParisTech (France). The example of culinary recipes is used to study the question of the precision of the mean and of the standard deviation of a variable for a population and for a subset of a population (used for estimating the characteristics of the population). After examining illustrations of mathematical results concerning these two quantities, the internationally accepted rules for propagating uncertainties are recalled and applied to calculate the number of significant figures in the expression of experimental means and standard deviations.

Course descriptions can be given at any level, from primary school to continuous education, spanning from teaching molecular gastronomy to using molecular gastronomy for teaching. An introduction is needed for explaining the context in which the course is given. Submitting of plain educational material (copies of slides etc.) is not sufficient, and the accounts must include descriptions of context, aims, and explanations of topics taught. The reviewing process cannot reproach to the authors of teaching a matter that is discussed elsewhere, but they will consider the originality of the material proposed and propose improvements (without obligation for the authors to accept them in their teaching). Among the review criteria are the coherence and originality of the course, in view of the context given in the introduction of the manuscript.