In “Avant-Garde Food Writing, Modernist Cuisine,” Allison Carruth examines the current culinary movement labeled “molecular gastronomy,” contesting the vision of it as an extension of modernism. This twenty-first-century culinary trend exemplifies a wider pattern in innovation-driven industries of laying claim to literary and artistic traditions of aesthetic and sociocultural experimentation. In developing this argument, Carruth employs the term “culinary lab” to describe restaurant incubators like Catalan chef Ferran Adrià’s now shuttered elBulli and to apprehend interconnections between the rhetoric of modernist cuisine and tropes of prototyping, entrepreneurship, and invention in engineering writ large. Comparing modernist cuisine to alimentary texts penned by avant-garde artists and writers, the essay historicizes not only the chefs, restaurants, and cuisines but also the engineers, biochemists, designers, and venture capitalists who are collectively imagining and monetizing culinary innovation in the contemporary period.