MANILA, Philippines ? Earlier this week, what?s being called the world?s first synthetic gourmet appetizer was served in a Hong Kong hotel.

The dish?apple and lemon-flavored jelly balls?was created by two Frenchmen: Pierre Gagnaire, a French chef with three Michelin stars to his name, and Hervé This, the founder of molecular gastronomy. In an article written for the journal Embo reports three years ago, This described the culinary trend as the science of ?how physics and chemistry can change cooking? for the better.

True to the creator?s cooking method, the appetizer was made from chemical compounds such as ascorbic acid, citric acid and the sugar substitute maltitol rather than ingredients such as actual apples and lemons.

Synthetic meals

This suggested making synthetic meals at least in part from chemical compounds might be a way of countering food shortages and allowing farmers to increase their profits. Even though people use fewer fruits and vegetables for their meals at any one time, he said, they?d still get their recommended daily allowances of vitamins and minerals.

Gagnaire and This aren?t the only ones who?ve made headlines for playing with their food this week. Consider the multivitamin-fortified corn Spanish researchers have developed to help the people in sub-Saharan Africa get the nutrients they need.

Roughly half of the world?s population suffers from one form of vitamin deficiency or another which could be remedied by a varied diet such as vegetables, fruit and fish. For those who are unable to diversify their meals however, the solution may lie in bio-fortified crops.

This was the idea behind the so-called ?golden rice??named for the added beta carotene or provitamin A that tinted the grains?introduced a few years ago. A study published online April 27 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has now gone a step further.

A way to enrich crops

Researchers led by Paul Christou from Spain?s University of Lleida have found a way to enrich crops with more than one vitamin at a time. The team infused the endosperm or inner layer of corn tissue that stores nutrients with high levels of three vitamins. The corn has 169 times the normal amount of beta carotene, twice the amount of folate or Vitamin B9 and 6 times the amount of Vitamin C.

?This achievement, which vastly exceeds any realized thus far by conventional breeding alone, opens the way for the development of nutritionally complete cereals to benefit the world?s poorest people,? Christou and his colleagues wrote.

So far in this column, the French have taken care of the appetizer and the Spaniards have the side dish figured out. For the main dish we turn to the food science and technology team at the American university Virginia Tech. These students have developed flavor spikes they hope to market commercially that can flavor meat and fish quickly and without the mess associated with marinating prior to cooking.

The product is a hard candy made of sugar, water and various spices. The idea was to package flavors into a shape hard enough to penetrate meat but which would dissolve during the cooking process to infuse the food.

?We?ve tested the product in chicken, beef and pork and found that it worked well in numerous applications,? said food science and technology team leader Kevin Holland in a statement.

One last item to wash everything down: Finnish researchers from the VTT Technical Research Center have developed a strain of beer yeast which, when used with extra sugar in a recipe, could be used to produce beers with higher alcohol content but the same flavor profiles. Their study appeared in the April issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

E-mail the author at massie@massie.com.