From NYC

Dear Friends,
Our American friends go on with Experimental Cuisine Collective :

Hello all,      Our second February ECC meeting will take place on Monday, February 25, from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Chemistry Department at NYU, room 1003 (31 Washington Place, between Washington Square Park and Greene Street). You will need a photo ID to enter the building.     Our speaker will be Rachel Dutton, a Bauer Fellow at Harvard University's FAS Center for Systems Biology, whose lab studies the microbial communities found on cheese. In caves and cellars around the world, communities of microbes colonize the surface of cheese as it ages. While these communities contribute to the aromas, flavors, and textures of aged cheeses, they can also be thought of as ideal model ecosystems to study microbes in their natural environment. With the advent of cheaper and more efficient DNA sequencing technologies, microbial communities can be examined in unprecedented detail. However, these techniques have rarely been applied to microbial ecosystems of fermented foods, and as a result, the exact nature of many of these communities remains a mystery. Dr. Dutton will discuss research in her lab using these DNA sequencing technologies to study community patterns in a collection of over 100 different types of cheese. She will discuss some of the highlights of this study, and the implications for future work and understanding of cheese. She will also discuss how her lab is using in vitro cheese to test models of community formation and interactions between microbes in the lab. Please RSVP at ecc022013b.eventbrite.com. A link is also posted on our website. If you RSVP and can no longer make it, please let me know right away so that your seat can be released---thank you!  All my best, Anne  ---- Anne E. McBride Director, Experimental Cuisine Collective

ABOUT THE EXPERIMENTAL CUISINE COLLECTIVE The Experimental Cuisine Collective is a working group that assembles scholars, scientists, chefs, writers, journalists, performance artists, and food enthusiasts. We launched in April 2007, as a result of the collaboration of Kent Kirshenbaum of the chemistry department and Amy Bentley of the nutrition, food studies, and public health department at New York University with Chef Will Goldfarb of WillPowder. Our overall aim is to develop a broad-based and rigorous academic approach that employs techniques and approaches from both the humanities and sciences to examine the properties, boundaries, and conventions of food. Visit the ECC online at www.experimentalcuisine.com.