Miwa Koizumi | artist | food-art happenings | high-tech experimentation

I ask Myhrvold if he thinks the kind of high-tech experimentation he is doing will ever become the norm in ordinary kitchens. "I'm not sure how safe it would be," he concedes. "This kind of cooking is beyond the realm of intuition. You need to know about the equipment, health issues, and the science behind it. But it's not necessarily inaccessible. There are hundreds of people doing it right now. But it's never going to displace the corner deli or pizzeria."

To artist Miwa Koizumi, that's the idea behind this kind of cooking. It's supposed to be strange, to make people reconsider their notions of eating. "I want people to think about taste, about what eating is like as a shared experience," she says. Koizumi, a Japanese-born artist who developed her career in France, is now based in New York City and creates food-art happenings at a performance space called the Flux Factory. Some of these happenings are pretty far-out, which is entirely intentional. Koizumi seeks to reacquaint us with our sense of taste. Thus, in the appetizer portion of All You Can Art, a food collaboration held last year, Koizumi set out to have visitors "eat air." A pomegranate seed was placed at the end of a syringelike plunger, and visitors were asked to plunge, shooting vaporizing pomegranate liquor into their mouths.

Koizumi's art is meant to be ethereal; she's using the techniques of molecular gastronomy to completely abstract flavor from texture. She gets some of her effects from liquid, as well - she used a centrifuge to separate the liquid from 100 tomatoes, producing a golden fluid that visitors were invited to taste. Without the familiar visual cues, many didn't know they were tasting the essence of tomato - which was exactly the point.