You know you're living in a late culture when a chef - in this case, three-Michelin-starred Catalan Chef Ferran Adrià - serves you shrimp broth in a pipette, foie gras that has been frozen and ground to a powder, and a mushroom appetizer spritzed with a custom-made woody fragrance. Historically speaking, such baroque food isn't the best indicator for a society's fate: Apicius wrote recipes for flamingo tongues and stuffed dormice shortly before Rome burned, and France's revolutionary deluge followed Louis XIV's marathon feasts by a mere few decades.