Why was the word new problematic when describing molecular cooking tools and ingredients?

The use of the word "new" to describe the tools, ingredients, and methods of molecular cooking was problematic because it was historically inaccurate. While these items were novel to the culinary world and absent from cookbooks as recently as the 1980s, they were not actually new inventions.1

Many of the tools, such as laboratory filters, decanting bulbs, vacuum evaporators, siphons, and ultrasonic probes, had long been established in chemistry laboratories. Similarly, ingredients like agar, carrageenan, and sodium alginate were already utilized in the food industry, and the use of liquid nitrogen in the kitchen had been proposed as early as 1907. Consequently, labeling these elements as "new" ignored their existing history in scientific and industrial contexts, even though their application in domestic and restaurant cooking was a modern development.12