Science & Cooking lecture series returns on Sept. 6

Inspired by one of the most talked-about Harvard College courses in recent history, “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter,” the Science & Cooking public lecture series will return on Sept. 6.

Members of the general public are once again invited to attend talks by world-class chefs and eminent food experts, including Grant Achatz, José Andrés, Ferran Adrià, Harold McGee, and Dan Barber.

The lectures and demonstrations do not replicate the course content but are meant to inform and inspire.

The kickoff event on Tuesday, Sept. 6, features Dave Arnold (Food Arts magazine’s Contributing Editor for Equipment and Food Science), Harold McGee (author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen and columnist for The New York Times), and David Weitz (Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics at Harvard and co-creator of the course).

The public lecture series runs through the end of the fall semester. A full schedule is available online.

For those who cannot attend in person, videos of the lectures will be made available online. An archive of past talks (from fall 2010) is available on iTunes U and YouTube.

The course and popular public lecture series grew out of a collaboration between the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Alícia Foundation in Spain.

The course, which will be offered for the second time at Harvard College in the fall of 2011, uses food and cooking to explicate fundamental principles in applied physics and engineering.