Dr. Ulpiano J. Vázquez

The Hon. Dr. Ulpiano J. Vázquez Martínez, PhD in Marketing, is joining as a Corresponding Member of the Royal European Academy of Doctors, with the lecture “Gastronomía: la confluencia de todos los saberes” (Gastronomy: the Confluence of All Knowledge).

Response by: Hon. Dr. Sonia Fernández-Vidal, PhD in Physics

Pending determination

Thursday, 5 March 2026

18:00 h

Format: In-person and streaming

Registration: Please confirm attendance with the Secretariat: secretaria@raed.academy or call +34 93 667 40 54

Gastronomy: the Confluence of All Knowledge

We eat out of necessity, but we cook out of culture. Few human activities encompass as much complexity, history, science, and beauty as the act of preparing and sharing food. From humble stoves to avant-garde kitchens, gastronomy is at once science, art, language, identity, economics, philosophy, history, religion, and many other things…

In this era that pushes us toward extreme specialization, gastronomy rises in rebellion as a total and integrative form of knowledge. In a single dish coexist the physics of heat, the chemistry of reactions, the mathematics of proportions, and the biology of nourishment. But centuries of history, economic decisions, social structures, artistic expressions, and ethical —even religious— dilemmas also manifest themselves. Eating, ultimately, is thinking the world in CAPITAL LETTERS.

This inaugural lecture for this Royal Academy of Doctors is a journey through the many faces of gastronomy. A journey across the territories of knowledge where food is not only matter, but metaphor. Where cooking is also storytelling, connecting, and transforming. And where academic knowledge can and must engage in dialogue with everyday life through a language as universal as the language of taste.

I invite you on this journey with the conviction that gastronomy is neither a minor nor a peripheral field of knowledge, as some might believe, but a crucible in which all the sciences —which this Royal Academy brings together so broadly through the many Doctors who form it— find their reflection. Because when one sits at the table, one also sits before history, before economics, before the sciences —even the so-called exact sciences— and ultimately, before oneself.

Follow the Event Live

You can follow the event live from this same page.