Food Design: The Food Laboratory

The essence of design is to consider and illustrate the look and function of a particular object, but when it comes to the food that we know, love, and eat, how far is too far?

Carolien Niebling is into sausage. Indeed, she has made them with dried fruits, pig’s heart and even insects. “There’s a willingness to compromise with new foods if the form is familiar,” she argues. “It’s a new treatment of a package we already know and that works because not everyone is quick to embrace new ideas in food, both individuals and food producers.”

Niebling is author of The Sausage of the Future and a food designer. She is a thinker working in the young discipline that looks at the ways in which new foods can be devised to offer greater accessibility, convenience, flavor, nutrition or entertainment. Since the rearing of meat is land- and grain-intensive, with her alternative sausages she is even into sustainability. “Food design is a way of not just improving food, but the presentation, the experience and all the rituals around food too,” she says.

The very idea that food can be designed much like any product dates back centuries, but is somehow largely forgotten. At least, until more recently, experimental chefs began playing with food forms.

“Food design is a way of not just improving food, but the presentation, the experience and all the rituals around food too.”

“There was a sense not just of the cost of the foodstuff, or the silver it sat on, but the skilled labor behind it,” says Melissa Calaresu, cultural historian and curator of Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800 at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK. “What they were very into was bringing an element of surprise into food to use fake food or trompe l’oeil to make the diner laugh. More recently, time pressures and the distractions of tech have made it harder for people to engage with food beyond the need to eat it.”

But that is changing. How about the idea of black milk or printed toast? What about fries that are made of rice or a burger whose shape aims to remind its eater of the meat’s origins – all ideas from Studio Minale-Maeda. Proposals from food design agency Enivrance include cereal eggs, double-headed lollipops, flavored twigs, grated ketchup, vegetables reconstituted in aspic-like blocks, or books of spices, from which pages can be torn out as required.

Italian designer Paolo Ulian has devised chocolate bars that measure the eater’s greediness, and biscuits shaped to fit over the fingertip for better dipping in chocolate. Likewise, food design pioneer Marti Guixe has suggested the likes of cakes reimagined as pie charts representing the ingredients in percentage form, or a system that allows pasta to be eaten like tapas.

Such concepts are being sought out by food producing giants, the likes of Nestlé and Danone, or food/drink brands such as Lavazza, Ferrero and Glenmorangie. But also seemingly unrelated names – L’Oréal and LVMH – increasingly see food as a key part of the wider design conversation. Small wonder that the past five years have seen the University of Reims, Design Academy Eindhoven and Milan’s Scuola Politecnica di Design launch the first degree courses in food design.

“At the luxury level, there is a need for experimental foods that stimulate on all levels and that can operate at the same level as fashion.”

“There is an awareness that there is so much happening in other design disciplines like fashion, and that food is comparatively dull despite the fact that food gives structure to our lives,” says Enivrance’s founder, Edouard Malbois. “At the luxury level there is a need for experimental foods that stimulate on all levels and that can operate at the same level as fashion. But there is also a need for massive change at the everyday, mass-market level.”

Certainly, the turnover of new ideas is gathering pace, and not just because food offers many parameters to explore, such as color, texture, consistency, shape, etc. The market matters. According to the SIAL International Food Fair, some 50 percent of sales of mass-market foods today concern products that were unknown five years ago. And yet, half of those new products that make it to the supermarket are pulled off the shelves within two years. There’s a consciousness not only of our growing desire for novelty, but that our food choices express our sense of identity and status.

“Most people think about food more now, but they still don’t think of it as having been designed,” says Marije Vogelzang, the founder of the Dutch Institute of Food and Design (the organization behind the Future Food Design Awards, the first global awards of their kind). “The big food producers are gradually opening up to new possibilities in terms of using food to explore all the senses. For example, in recognizing that the way food is designed is a reflection of the way we live; how impatient we are, how mobile, how curious. People used to tell me that food was not a serious subject for design. Now, there’s a rapid turnover of projects all over the world.”

Of course, some new food design ideas can still seem more wacky than appealing, though the same was once said of the likes of pre-washed salad or flavored water. Look closer and even many traditional foodstuffs are examples of impressive design that typically go underappreciated, if acknowledged at all; the sushi roll, lasagna, the pita pocket, and so on. As Italian designer Bruno Munari noted in 1963, albeit tongue-in-cheek, “The orange is an almost perfect object in which one may observe an absolute coherence of form, function and consumption.” Other designers are now thinking hard about how to give us more oranges.

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