Harold McGee is an American author who writes about the chemistry, technique and history of food and cooking and has written two seminal books on kitchen science. His first book, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen was initially published in 1984. A greatly revised second edition was published in 2004. McGee has also written for Nature, Health, The New York Times, the World Book Encyclopedia, The Art of Eating, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, and Physics Today and lectured on kitchen chemistry at cooking schools, universities, The Oxford Symposia on Food, the Denver Natural History Museum and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. McGee also consults for restaurants and manufacturers. Currently, he writes a regular column for the New York Times, The Curious Cook, which examines, and often debunks, conventional kitchen wisdom. Along with Dave Arnold and Nils Noren, he also teaches a three-day class at the French Culinary Institute in New York City entitled the Harold McGee Lecture Series.

Education

Prior to becoming a food science writer McGee was a literature and writing instructor at Yale. He received his B.S in Literature (1973) from the California Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D from Yale University.

Influence

McGee's science-based approach to cooking has been embraced and popularized by chefs and authors such as Heston Blumenthal, Alton Brown, Shirley Corriher, Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Russ Parsons.

Books

• On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (ISBN 0-684-80001-2, 2004)
• The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore (ISBN 0-02-009801-4, 1990)

McGee has two upcoming book projects as of late 2008. The first is a short (150-page) compendium of practical information on food and cooking and the second is a book on taste and smell and flavor.

External links

• Curious Cook
• Organic Farming, talking at Google
• On Food, NPR December 2004
• Cooking with IEEE Spectrum: Harold McGee