(Applause)
I would like to share a dream with you.
I dream of a floating island, but of a real floating island.
An island that would fly in the air, which I would catch in flight,
that I would eat, that I would eat.
Whites so high that they would go up in the air.
Scented tunes, a delight in levitation.
Only, I can look in all the cookbooks,
I do not find this island recipe ultra-floating.
So Pericles tells me that if I want something I’ve never had,
I have to do something that I have never done.
I’ll have to immerse myself in these snow-whites,
that I understand them a little differently,
and that I write my own recipe with new techniques.
So, as a scientist, I’m going to look in those snowy whites,
to the eye, the magnifying glass, the microscope,
and we see very beautiful bubbles, infinities of bubbles,
there is plenty of air in there, and it does not want to fly.
There is plenty of air, but also this water of constitution in the whites in snow,
and finally all that, it moves.
We have whites, water, albumin, and that lives, it’s not at all fixed.
The material is not fixed.
He moves small things,
and it drains, it gets complicated because it lives.
Before that, we say …
I tried to put helium instead of these air bubbles,
to fly.
But by interface problems,
because around all these bubbles, there are so-called interfaces,
the helium diffuses very quickly, and finally these whites in snow do not fly.
The interface is still something wonderful,
something key here,
since it is a medium that is neither water nor air,
and it’s both water and air.
It’s a real third state.
It is a very beautiful subject, but also a very complex subject.
And alone, we can not solve complex topics.
So, 10 years ago, in search of magic recipes,
I met Thierry Marx, Marx-sensei,
and I told him about my interfaces,
of my dreams of floating and greedy interfaces.
To keep this lexical field of the kitchen,
I would say that mayonnaise took immediately.
It was the beginning of a bifurcation in my professional life,
and a very beautiful adventure that was born.
And I thank him very much.
4 years ago, we went up
the French Center for Culinary Innovation,
hosted in the Faculty of Sciences of Orsay,
who has always supported us with passion.
Two years ago, I was offered to hold the first university chair
“Cuisine of the Future”.
In this chair, immediate boarding of students, knowledge and know-how
and then it’s a place of exchange, experimentation,
with science, cooking, design, gastronomy, sociology, technology,
in short, all people who are passionate and want to work for cooking in 2050
because the question is that:
“What will we eat in 2050?
How to combine pleasure above all, culinary emotion,
but also well-being and then sustainable cooking? “
Because, yes, in 2050, we would be 9 billion on Earth,
to share the same resources.
The same is the ones that are there from the beginning of the world,
not one more, not one less,
we live in isolation.
Water, for example, will be one of the major stakes,
and already is today,
and it will be worse and worse.
How to transport water?
How to best distribute it?
It’s not that far from my snowy whites,
since it is only a question of water at the interfaces of my air bubbles.
If we look at the evolution of water, well, in the evolution of man,
that it is technological,
the transport of water has always been a real challenge.
We tamed the land and the fire very quickly, and we were able to make jars.
The jars is very convenient, except that it is quite bulky,
bulky, breakable, and not so tight as that.
Because this interface, this bottle wall,
is not so tight.
Water will evaporate a bit, and microbes will come back.
So we had to evolve.
If we look at this evolution, since Prehistory and then much in Egypt,
we could use glass, which appeared as a way to create containers.
It will be necessary to wait for the Roman Empire, so many centuries after that,
to make and see the first glass bottles appear,
perfectly waterproof, but still fragile.
We continue to evolve,
and 1960, appearance of plastic.
The plastic is fantastic, you know the song,
at that time, PVC, if it is blown like glass,
can create these bottles, perfectly waterproof, unbreakable, very light,
in short, a real revolution.
Except that we realize today that this revolution has limits,
because plastic comes from fossil fuels,
so fossil fuels mean more and more expensive,
because more and more rare,
and especially there is a big problem of pollution on this planet,
and it’s getting worse and worse.
It had to evolve.
Evolve how?
Designers and engineers worked to make us bottles
more and more fine, until losing the use.
We have more and more flexible bottles,
it’s not always very practical.
With these bottles, we feel that we have reached a limit.
This incremental innovation no longer works.
So we have to change.
The worst thing is that everyone offers us the same thing,
everyone is engulfed in this unique and dead-end way,
like sheep.
And this image of sheep scares me, I do not want to turn like sheep.
We all know the destination, and we all have the same.
The question is:
“Is there no way to fork,
to make one’s own life, one’s own way, different from others? “
This is my core business, my philosophy of life.
Why my core business?
Because as a researcher, everyday,
we must create new paths, exploit new tracks,
borrow them, test them, select them, and look at what works or not.
For that, we must accept jumps to the unknown,
we must accept its limits, exceed its limits and constraints,
and it’s a real problem, a breakthrough innovation.
Breakthrough innovation in water bottles,
what could it be, concretely?
Like these snowy whites, let’s go back to the microscope,
let’s go back into the matter,
to take a closer look at what nature offers us around us.
If you look at cherry tomatoes, grapes,
you have very thin skin, yet vegetables are 90% water.
It’s real little natural water bottles
that have been manufactured for millions of years.
It’s pretty wonderful to watch how this wall is made.
It’s lignin, cellulose, pectins,
in short it is large structures, more or less tight and porous,
and it’s still stories of interfaces that will separate two environments,
with diffusion from one side to the other,
and balances.
That being so, we say to ourselves:
try to imitate nature.
Biomimicry, bio-inspired.
Nature has been evolving for millions of years,
and constantly, she, too, is testing different paths.
It selects and retains only solutions that work.
As much bio-inspired.
We went to the world of seaweed, plant,
and we explored this fascinating world of diversity, evolution strategies.
These are polymers, structures, large fibers.
Polymers, it’s interesting, it’s like plastics.
At the same structures, the same properties.
The question is:
why could not we do
a bottle of water with an algae skin, for example?
Algae after all, it is light, biodegradable and not soluble in water.
So, let’s try.
We took this path,
and we came to a bottle of water,
that I have here.
That’s 90% water and a membrane.
This bottle of water is a can made of seaweed skin.
I pierce, I drink.
And I could throw, it’s completely biodegradable.
Zero plastic, zero aluminum, zero waste.
And everything is eaten, besides I can even eat a piece.
And here we are on a real breaking innovation,
since we replaced plastic, we replaced all that.
Thank you very much.
Here is this membrane, this vegetable capsule.
We put here zests as you see.
Orange zests that will come to perfume the water inside.
Another story of osmosis, interface,
of exchange between the container and the content.
This photo is from Mathilde de l’Ecotais,
a visual artist with whom we have the chance to work.
And with such images, we already leave the cosmos, we go into the dream.
She has the art of sublimating the culinary and artistic emotions.
Always with this desire of escape in the cosmos,
we’ve tested…
We left with Thierry Marx and Jean-François Clervoy,
in weightlessness in the flight CNES and Novespace A310,
and we tested this fabrication
and this consumption of can in weightlessness.
Finally, thanks to these extraordinary experiences,
extraordinary scientific and above all human experiments,
we learned a lot about the resistance of these materials,
since they must be both soft enough to absorb shocks,
but rigid enough to be manipulated,
and serve as a real edible container.
Finally, we come back to Earth with new ideas, new tracks,
because you see that instead of taking this path that is uni-directional,
this can is a starting point for new things.
This is an excuse to explore new tracks.
And that’s what’s extremely interesting,
we did not know where we were going at the beginning,
and now we’re working on films that are plant covers,
stretch films that will replace the cellophanes.
We have a real breakthrough innovation, and it’s extremely exciting
to start from a new point and birfurquer.
We have infinite branches, thought fractals,
and extremely complex paths.
You see, with this first idea that was:
I want to make a floating island,
by this interface problem,
we deviated, we forked.
But ultimately, no matter the destination,
it is the beauty of the path that wins and counts.
And when I see this cherry blossom image,
it reminds me of Hokusai, Japanese prints,
this floating world, the Ukiyo-e in Japanese,
a country that is very dear to me.
It’s this image of flying, starting from facts anchored like this tree,
anchored the most real facts,
to the spatial end of the most abstract and tall branches.
In leisure, I paint very modestly too,
I wanted to finish on that.
Well, this floating world, my floating world,
which is a fluctuating absolute as I call it,
and who, here too, it is this idea of escape, of travel,
with this notion that my spirit in freedom, which goes everywhere,
but with that floating, fluctuating side of a researcher’s mind
but before all a little dreamer.
Thank you.
(Applause)
”
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