Curiosity Fuels Food Innovation, Says J. Kenji López-Alt

Innovation doesn't begin with invention—it begins with curiosity, chef and author J. Kenji López-Alt told attendees Monday during a keynote at IFT FIRST.

“I tend to think of creativity as the end result of curiosity,” he said. López-Alt, a bestselling cookbook author and James Beard Award–winning chef, has built his career on scientific curiosity, and in the session, he took the audience on a journey through his creative process.

As a writer and recipe developer, López-Alt is noted for his interest in exploring and explaining the way that scientific processes come together in cooking, an approach reflected in his bestselling cookbook, The Food Lab.

“I thought if I could understand how all of these fundamental pieces came together, then I could make just about anything,” he said. “For me, the initial instincts were always to look closer,” a process that he’s come to think of as “zooming in” on how ingredients and techniques function in food product formulation.

His approach to recipe development starts with asking cooks what problem they are trying to solve. “For me, that is always what science is for,” he said. “Science is the best tool for understanding a problem well enough that you can start to make that problem a little easier. To me, science is like giving someone a map.”

While scientific understanding remains central to his work, López-Alt said he has increasingly realized that technical knowledge alone isn't enough.

López-Alt said he continues to recognize the importance of “zooming in,” but lately his thought process has changed to include what he termed “zooming out.”

“Food ultimately isn’t about optimization,” he observed. “It’s about people. Food is about memory and generosity and curiosity. It’s about the exchange of cultures. And technical understanding can help support those goals, but it should never replace them.

“There’s never a moment when I’m working on something and I sit down and say, ‘Well, I’m going to invent something today,’” he continued. “Instead, I start with a person standing in their kitchen and feeling frustrated.”

López-Alt likened the creative process to the pointillism painting technique in which an artist creates an image by applying tiny dots of paint. “I think of it almost like a pointillism painting, where you zoom in. One dot might be something that you learned about the way cheese melts,” he said. “One dot might be a conversation with a farmer. One dot might be an experience you had with your grandmother.” As those bits of information accumulate, he said, the brain begins connecting them.

“Science is what allows us to place all those thoughts in our picture,” he reflected. “Creativity allows us to step back and see the whole picture.”

Ultimately, López-Alt said, combining the “zooming in” and the “zooming out” approaches may be the best route to product innovation. “Neither one of those perspectives—whether it’s looking very closely using a microscope or pulling back and getting more of a bird’s-eye view—neither one of those approaches, I think, is effective on its own. I think it actually requires both of those things to really be able to innovate, to come up with creative ideas, and to come up with solutions that are useful.”

In his next book, López-Alt said he intends to embrace the “zooming out” perspective and focus less on step-by-step recipes and ingredient lists and more on the patterns and rhythms of cooking, as well as bringing in cultural and historical perspectives.

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