In 1984, Harold McGee’s beloved book, On Food and Cooking renewed our awareness of the inextricable link between science and cooking, and we began to shift our attention towards the value of that relationship. In 2011, Modernist Cuisine took the science of food to a new aesthetic extreme. In that span of 30 years, the culture and attitudes surrounding food science have evolved as much as its tools and technology. Harold McGee, Maxime Bilet, and Anne McBride discuss these advances, illustrated in the contrasts between these two ground-breaking books.