Weed + any food = yum.

You know, there is a place in the world for "culinary engineering." I'm not talking about the manly art of flipping burgers on the grill. (Although there are actually better and worse techniques for that, too... empirically-derived....) If you don't make use of at least two kitchen scales (with different levels of precision), a superfast probe thermometer with thermocouple, an infrared thermometer, and a pH meter in your kitchen on a regular basis, you're not living up to the engineer's creed.

(I know what some of you are thinking -- what the heck is a pH meter doing in a kitchen? Very useful for testing the place of sourdough in its life cycle, whether your dill pickles and sauerkraut are properly fermented, even getting the perfect lemonade strength...)

My kitchen is also outfitted with a bunch of lab glassware -- Erlenmeyer flasks make great containers for oils and things you don't want to spill (laboratory glassware tends to have good lips to prevent a lot of dripping). A 2-liter or 5-liter beaker is great for measuring the rise of bread dough and its "doubling." All my spices are conveniently alphabetized in large test tubes in a test tube rack.

Engineering can be applied to most problems. Cooking is just applied chemistry, and therefore it amounts to chemical engineering on a very small scale. For example, using precision instruments can actually give your cooking an edge (particularly in baking), as long as you know what you're doing.

If you want to get even more fancy, keep a "lab notebook" of your "experiments." Note successful techniques to replicate your "experiments" for a dinner party. Record the weather and kitchen conditions when you're doing anything involving yeast or other microorganisms (like making your own cultured buttermilk). etc.

One can go overboard. I have yet to set up a distillation column to make my own extracts and essential oils, but that will probably happen at some point....

By the way, perhaps the problem is terminology. I spend a lot of time cooking, and I enjoy a fancy dinner at many "fancy" restaurants. But I'd never associate myself with the term "foodie," which I think of almost as an insult. Perhaps that's because most of the people whom I know and consider themselves "foodies" are pretentious idiots who care more about what the "hot" restaurants are, what the "hip" ways to make certain food are, etc., rather than whether it actually tastes good to anyone.

You're right -- "foodies" are not engineers, any more than an haute couture dress designer is an engineer. But that doesn't mean we can't use engineering to create newer better fabrics, better dyes, more efficient or durable designs for clothing, etc. Whether the fashion snobs will accept it (as the foodies judge the new restaurant or sniff their wine) is beside the point. Unlike in clothing fashion, most people are happy to eat good food cooked at home, without the approval of some elite.