Q411: Design Digest

DESIGN:DIGEST

3579/11_E_09

wanteddesign.co.za

Dating back to 1692, Spier’s vinous history is as old as the farm itself.

Spier’s award-winning 21 Gables Chenin Blanc and Pinotage wines celebrate the legacy of winemaking in South Africa, as well as our farm’s unique architectural feature – an unrivalled 21 Cape Dutch Gables.

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Iconic stuff

Foodcorp’s commitment to innovation and the development of food design in South Africa resulted in the food manufactuer teaming up with Design Indaba for an exciting brand challenge.

The Foodcorp Design Challenge 2011 involved four of Foodcorp’s iconic South African brands: Yum Yum Peanut Butter, Glenryck Pilchards, Ouma Rusks and Mageu Number 1.

In June this year 10 of South Africa’s leading design schools were selected and presented with an exciting and stimulating design project: students were offered the opportunity to produce cutting-edge ideas for the four brands that included overall packaging, marketing and advertising, in a quest to take each brand to a new level for Foodcorp’s loyal South African consumer market.

The deadline for entries was 14 October 2011. The judging panel includes graphic designer Richard Hart, co-owner of design studio Disturbance; Pepe Marais, executive creative director of Joe Public Advertising Agency; and Mike Schalit, cofounder of advertising agency Net#work BBDO. They are now left with the exciting task of studying

the entries and selecting the most innovative design proposal.

The winner of the design challenge will be announced in the coming weeks and will receive an Apple Mac and R5 000 for sharing his/her creative genius. The school the winner attends will receive R10 000.

The Foodcorp Design Challenge 2011 provides the opportunity for young design students to envisage and create a unique design and marketing package. The winner of this challenge will not only receive an Apple Mac and some extra cash, but will be gaining national recognition and exposure for his/her innovation that will be used to grow and reimagine Foodcorp’s four iconic South African brands.

The winner of the Foodcorp Design Challenge 2011 will formally be announced in the next issue of Design Indaba magazine (quarter one of 2012).

Ingredients for a meal of baked potato with romesco sauce, whitting in salsa verde and rice pudding, as shown in Ferran Adrià’s The Family Meal. Photo by Francesc Guillamet. Courtesy of Phaidon, www.phaidon.com. More on page 62

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News snippets Declaración de Lima Pop supping Biting bytes Peace meal Story of an African farm Food fight Paola Antonelli + Marion Nestle Food city Smart art of eating The bull is not dead Emo kitchen Foraging in 4'33 René Redzepi + Marije Vogelzang Brain food Mass objective Taste bud trickery Fit for consumption Naked revolution Food = fashion Books and apps

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We always say that everything humans do is sex driven. One can do without sex. Even though it would probably be a dull kind of existence, sex-deprivation has never proven to be lethal. Nobody can do without food.

Food is at the base, but also on every other level, of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. As food climbs up the ladder of Maslow’s pyramid, mere “food” transforms into “the act of eating”, and possibly “feeding” (as this can be an act of inspiration), in the top section.

It has therefore surprised me that, 15 years ago food as a medium or a topic of design was a rare activity. Could it be that designers were overlooking the topic to rather create lasting objects that immortalise themselves through their designs? Could it be that the act of eating is such a basic activity that designers forgot what was there right in front of them?

Yes, designers have made millions of ovens, kitchens and crockery sets. But the topic of food was left to the métier of chefs who were concerned with flavour and gastronomical pleasures, which in itself is a loveable goal in life and there’s nothing I have against it.

Times have changed and I have to tell you that I am extremely excited, even ecstatic, about the revolution of eating and creativity that has hit the world of design and creative thinking like an eating-design tsunami. For me, working with a non-lasting material

actually makes me proud to know that eventually all I do as an eating designer is make shit.

It makes sense to use food as a topic and medium for design. The world has never seen more schizophrenia on the food side of life than today.

We eat things that we don’t know who made or what they made it of.

We have never been so disconnected to nature while at the same time we grow rooftop-gardens and buy cookbooks like it’s the new religion.

While more people eat alone and get obese, Denmark has a fat tax. Some children in the USA are obese and malnourished at the same time.

Food allergies are mushrooming and slow food is growing big. So is the waist of the average Westernworld child.

Designers themselves are also ready to shift from the materialisation of shape only, to the possibility of ideological design that can be a service, an experience or an emotion.

And what material gets closer to you, goes inside your body and is more connected to emotions than food?

When intelligent creativity meets the act of eating we can expect a powerful generator of positive changes for the future. I’m excited to be a part of this.

So are the people in this magazine.

They show that eating design connects everything with everybody. This is just the beginning.

Marije Vogelzang www.designindaba.com/speaker/marije-vogelzang

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Nearly every day for the past 90 days Marije Vogelzang has asked me what I ate yesterday. Initially, under housearrest with a broken ankle and starved for human contact, I answered elaborately, including my moods and nicotine withdrawal. When I returned to the office and its commensurate distractions, the game continued for a while, especially around the excitement of what my mother had packed in my lunchbox. By the time the stress and mad rush of the print deadline hit, however, I’d gotten to the point of just blatantly, rudely ignoring Marije’s questions.

Still, Marije persisted. I began asking myself if it’s her standard email tagline or if she is intentionally monitoring my eating by making me feel so self-conscious and embarrassed about what I really do eat. I defended my eating to myself by remembering that I do buy fresh meat and vegetables, and even cook. Even free-range eggs and hardly any beef. But then I arrived home and found the frozen fish, premade pesto, and canned staples like chopped tomatoes, coconut milk and chickpeas at the bottom of the shopping bag‌ At least it wasn’t a plastic bag!

Working on this edition of the magazine has been gruelling and educational, and there will no doubt be changes to my eating habits, some witting, some unwitting. Thanks to Marije Vogelzang’s expert guidance on the editorial content of the “Design:Digest� edition of the magazine, you’ll be happy to know that the contents are far loftier than what I ate yesterday.

Cover photo by Adam Laycock for Hel Yes!

The world’s leading chefs show their mettle by penning the “DeclaraciĂłn de Limaâ€?, and we talk to RenĂŠ Redzepi, Ferran AdriĂ and Homaru Canto. Marion Nestle and Paola Antonelli discuss the problems with the current food system and how creatives are interpreting this – many examples of which are in the showcase of food-related design. We celebrate Jamie Oliver’s activism, MartĂ­ GuixÊ’s discipline-defining work and all those unknown food designers who have shaped our everyday meals.

Besides looking at design solutions for the farming limitations of Africa, Carolyn Steel tells us about the edible city and Brian Wansink describes mindless eating. After we consider the pop-up restaurant and urban foraging trends, Marjan Ippel explains that food equals fashion. And just before you thought what you eat is not cool enough to read this magazine, we rile up a warm-blooded crew of designers, chefs, experts and activists to debate the food issues of the day in our “Food Fight�.

Food becomes especially prominent as we near the end of the year. I would also like to share Design Indaba’s season’s greetings with all of you. We hope you’re looking forward to 2012 as much as we are, and join us for the Design Indaba Conference from 29 February to 2 March and Expo from 2 to 4 March. There are also a host of brand new events and projects being launched at the 2012 event, so follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up for the newsletter at www.designindaba.com/newsletter.

So, what did you eat yesterday?

Nadine

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Design:Digest

Publisher Ravi Naidoo Editor Nadine Botha, nadine@interactiveafrica.com online content DELIA de Villiers, delia@interactiveafrica.com CONTRIBUTORS Kelly Berman, Maciek Dubla, Kim Gurney, Marjan Ippel, Elizabeth Thacker Jones, Jo Parsons, Michelle Matthews, Lynda Relph-Knight Designers Niel Meiring, Anthea Forlee Promotions MACIEK DUBLA Advertising Manager Bethwell Mnyamana, Bethwell@interactiveafrica.com Subscription Manager MEAGAN POOLE, MEAGAN@interactiveafrica.com Finance Controller Lindsay Roberts Printing Paarl Media Paarl Design IndabaÂŽ Conference lindsay roberts, lindsay@interactiveafrica.com Design IndabaÂŽ Expo kelly berman, kelly@interactiveafrica.com t +27 21 465 9966 f +27 21 465 9978 Physical Design IndabaÂŽ Magazine, Level 3, 16 Mill Street, Oranjezicht, Cape Town 8001, South Africa Postal Design IndabaÂŽ Magazine, P.O. Box 7735, Roggebaai, Cape Town 8012, South Africa WWW.DESIGNINDABA.COM The Design IndabaÂŽ 2011 Partners Main sponsors Woolworths, ABSA, Grolsch, DSTV Web Partner South African Tourism DevelopmentAL partners City of Cape Town, DEPARTMENT OF ARTS AND CULTURE Produced by Interactive Africa Suppliers Jupiter DRAWING ROOM, Bizcommunity, Sappi, Foodcorp, Mail&Guardian Associates Anglo Platinum, Scan Display Solutions, Cape Town Tourism, MINI Media partners Axis, IdN, +81, Artravel, Icon, DAMn, Mahala, Novum, Designboom, Design Observer Group, Shots, Coolhunting, Fast Company, Abitare, WGSN, Casa Vogue Media supporterS Creative Review, EgoDesign, Advantage, Enjin, Film & EVENT Publishing, Designtimes, Next 48 Hours, Design Week

Design IndabaÂŽ magazine is published by Interactive Africa. The views expressed in Design IndabaÂŽ magazine by contributing writers are not necessarily those of Interactive Africa. The publication of any ÂŽ advertising material in Design Indaba magazine does not imply any endorsement in respect of goods or services described therein. Interactive Africa accepts no responsibility for any loss, damage, expense or injury suffered or arising from reliance on any advice or information contained in Design IndabaÂŽ magazine. No part of the publication (visual or written) may be reproduced in any form without the prior, written consent of the publishers.

AW Conqueror Carved. 2009 copyright (c) by Jean Francois Porchez, Typofonderie. All rights reserved. Distributed exclusively by AWFP (Arjowiggins) under licence with Typofonderie. Any distribution to a third party is prohibited. Names are trademarks in some cases. This font software may not be reproduced, modified, disclosed or transfered without the express written approval of Jean Francois Porchez, Porchez Typofonderie. AW Conqueror typeface family is distributed by AWFP (Arjowiggins) under licence with Typofonderie until 1st April 2012. Whatever the use is, third parties are not authorised to use AW Conqueror without a proper licence from Arjowiggins or Typofonderie. You must have accepted the licence to use the font. Contact us: AWFP (Arjowiggins), www.arjowiggins.com. After 1st April 2012: Jean Francois Porchez - type designer - Typofonderie / http://www.typofonderie.com / info@typofonderie.com email / +33 (0)1 46 54 26 92 phone / France

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Constantly seeking reinvention, the award-winning Design Indaba magazine has become a tactile collector’s item.

Profiling legends, upstarts and trends from across the world, it features fashion, architecture, graphics, animation, product, interior, industrial and jewellery design. Birthed in South Africa, it presents an alternative aesthetic vision based on the notion that a better world can be designed.

The magazine about how creativity changes everything.

www.designindaba.com/subscribe

educational integration The Inkwenkwezi Secondary School in the Du Noon township outside Cape Town is more than a structure that facilitates teaching and learning.

Designed by Noero Wolff Architects for the Department of Transport and Public Works in the Western Cape, the school serves as a beacon for raising the aspirations of local people, highlighting the importance of education and focusing on the need for education to be more accessible to all.

Located on the edge of a township that accommodates more than its fair share of cultural diversity, the design of the school is robust and practical, while also being crafted in a visually appealing way.

Working with a minimal budget, concrete was used for the main frame of the school while block work was used for the infill. The classroom and hall space were specifically designed to allow natural light to filter in through the roof and bounce off the walls to reduce glare.

Graphics and colours used on the exterior of the building took heed of the surrounding buildings to ensure that the school integrates with its built environment, making it even more accessible. Colourful, handdrawn signage was incorporated to capture the vibrant sense of this informal settlement.

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Months of talks and planning between Design Indaba and Mr Sun Chao, the Party Secretary of the CPC Minhang District Committee in Shanghai, China, have paved the way for a partnership between the city of Shanghai and Design Indaba. Three distinct projects will be coordinated and managed over the next three years, including Design Indaba consulting on the creation of a design school of international excellence; as well as the establishment of a Design Indaba Gallery to showcase exhibitions of the best design and creativity sourced from around the world. The third project will be the first-ever international instalment of the Design Indaba Conference.

For the first time, Paul Sahre, James Victore and Jan Wilker relocated their legendary annual New York graphic design workshop to Cape Town in September. Presented by Design Indaba in association with NAMPAK, some 42 participants delighted in the trio’s off-the-wall approach. Besides the formal workshop during the day, participants enjoyed informal presentations and beers at the local dive at night. “We have built the workshop around the idea that, although the three of us have some crossover, we really have very different approaches to how we design and we wanted to expose the students to our varying points of view,” Wilker explained.

SahreVictoreWilker in Cape Town

Design Indaba and Shanghai

index: 2011 winners

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Looking at more than aesthetic appeal, the Index: Awards consider design that offers a solution to some of the world’s major challenges like climate change, pollution, natural disasters, loneliness, elderly care, poverty and over-consumption.

Launched in 2002, the award has grown to such an extent as to receive almost 1 000 nominations from 78 countries this year. Not surprising when a cash prize of €500 000 is shared between five winners, one each from the body, home, work, play and community categories.

Yves Béhar won in the body category for his “See Better to Learn Better” (VErBieno) project that enabled the rollout of free eyeglasses for Mexican schoolchildren.

“Elemental Monterrey”, the brainchild of architect Alejandro Aravena, won in the home category with its revolutionary new model for low-cost social housing.

From India, Kiran Bir Sethi’s “Design for Change” initiative took the prize in the work category. Bir Sethi founded a school-based design competition to encourage children to express their own ideas for a better world.

In the community category, the “Design Seoul” urban project from South Korea was honoured. Design Seoul created the first-ever coherent design-based approach to improve life for citizens in a very large city.

Swedish Hövding’s invisible airbag for cyclists’ heads won in the play category.

feasting on movies and design On selected evenings in November, the Freeworld Design Centre in collaboration with Hemelhuijs, local food celebrities and Design Indaba, will be running a delectable series of themed evenings where renowned foodies will be introducing the screening of their all-time favourite food movie, accompanied by a meal designed to fit the movie by food artist Jacques Erasmus of Hemelhuijs.

These themed food movie evenings are connected to a Design for Food interior design exhibition that will be on show at Freeworld until 21 January 2012. Visit www.freeworlddesigncentre. co.za for a full programme or book tickets at www.webtickets.co.za.

Freeworld will also host a Designer Maker Christmas Market from 14 to 16 December.

ways of living Taking place at the Design Museum in London, The Way We Live Now is an exhibition celebrating Sir Terence Conran’s 80th birthday. Over the past 50 years, Conran’s own design work, coupled with his entrepreneurial flair contributed significantly to the look of the British home. The exhibition explores this unique impact of his on contemporary life and lifestyle in Britain. The exhibition runs until 4 March 2012.

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soho synagogue Dror Benshetrit’s Soho Synagogue is this New York community’s first-ever synagogue and a marvellous design intervention to boot.

The design direction and details of the religious space evokes various meanings. The striped front window ensures that the space is private while the hanging strips are also reminiscent of the tallit shawl that Jewish men wear for their prayers.

Other features in the synagogue include an installation in shades of blue with the names of the donors that made the construction possible.

Lines on the ceiling work to create a “narrowing” effect for the passage that leads to the prayer room, while the dual use of light bulbs and dark lines on the ceiling resemble a menorah.

Passing by elements of steel and glass, visitors arrive at a sanctuary where the art panels on the walls can be taken off and unfolded into chairs or tables. Here low couches replace traditional prayer benches and Edison bulbs work to add a retro lighting feel.

Some of the history and characteristics of the building were retained by leaving industrial elements, such as large pipes, exposed. There is also a Torah Arc, made with overlapping circles, which are able to open and close, with each featuring a triangle that together forms the Star of David.

Photos by John M Hall.

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stick it up Taking art out of the gallery and onto the streets of both city and township, the Paste street art exhibition appeared and disappeared in Cape Town and Khayelitsha recently. Curated by SJ Artists and Between 10 and 5, some 15 Cape Town creatives were selected to design, illustrate or photograph work around the theme of “Khayelitsha Culture”. The work was then turned into large-scale wheat pastes.

Participants included Simon Berndt of One Horse Town, Paul Ward, Lauren Fowler, Jonx Pillemer, Black Koki, Chris Slabber and Fuzzy Slipperz.

very nice Designed in response to the dire shortage of desks in lower-income schools in Africa, the Baja desk is able to grow with the child from age three to 12. The brainchild of Yolandi Schreuder, half of the Our Awesome Work design duo, Baja comprises six interlocking parts, making it easy to assemble and disassemble, and weighs only 4kg, making it easy to store and transport. Baja is a play on the Afrikaans word “baie” meaning “many” or “plentiful” and hints to the possibilities of this desk. Designed to stimulate children’s cognitive and motor skills, the desk is also orientated towards fostering creativity and developing social skills – one desk can seat up to four children.

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community schooling Stefan Antoni Olmesdahl Truen Architects (SAOTA) actively involved the community in the design and construction of the Mankgaile Primary School, which also serves as a community centre.

In a rural village outside Polokwane in Limpopo and sponsored by PetroSA, the school is a landmark facility in the village, replacing numerous dilapidated buildings. “Being the most important building in the village and – as it is used as the village community centre – place of gathering, functions and sporting events, it was felt that the building needed to have presence and stature for the community. A formal and symmetrical arrangement was felt to be most appropriate to reinforce this aspect,” Stefan Antoni explains.

The main entrance to the school sits at the end of a linear-shaped building, which arranges the central public square and two open-air classroom courtyards with nine different rooms spread across two levels. Eucalyptus sticks were used to create shade in the courtyard. The sticks are supported by a colonnade of steel posts. As such, the light is filtered to create dappled patterns throughout the outdoor corridors.

Face brick was the material of choice for the school due to it being maintenance free. The colour of the chosen bricks is also almost identical to the colour of the soil. Accents on the buildings were created by using plaster in various ways. It was a conscious decision by the architects to keep the use of steel to a minimum.

Members of the community were actively involved in the process of building the school and are now able to take rightful ownership of the facility as not only a school but also as a community centre.

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london 2012

space engagement “Textile Field” is the result of a collaboration between the Bouroullec Brothers, Ronan and Erwan, and Danish textile maker Kvadrat. Measuring 30 by 8 metres, the large colourful installation in the Raphael Gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum encourages visitors to engage the surrounding space.

The Bouroullec Brothers “wanted to propose a different approach to freely experience what can be quite an intimidating environment, such as a museum”.

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hard workin’ jeans Baby once made her blue jeans talk but Project Sunshine make their jeans work a little bit harder. The result of researchers at Sheffield University teaming up with the London College of Fashion, this outdoor installation comprised jeans with photocatalysts added to the cloth, thereby enabling them to absorb air pollutants using Lilliput-like nanotechnology.

heritage inspired Fashion designers Stiaan Louw, Heni Este-Hijzen and Laduma Ngxokolo showed their work at the London Fashion Week as part of the Ubuntu project. The trio is seen to represent a South African look that draws on traditional influences and a particular heritage aesthetic interpreted as very modern.

Taking place at the Vauxhall Fashion Scout, the Ubuntu project is part of a three-year programme to promote South African design internationally.

Started by Errol Hendrickse two years ago, rather than being sales-focussed, the idea of this initiative is to introduce Louw, Este-Hijzen and Ngxokolo to the larger fashion industry.

The trio worked on eight different looks. Louw showed pieces from the collection that had shown at Joburg Fashion Week earlier this year. EsteHijzen worked on a collection inspired by the Ndebele tribes. Ngxokolo showed his characteristic Xhosainspired knitwear.

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typo london

2011

places of type There is no one like Chip Kidd. The New York book designer reigns supreme on the conference circuit as an engaging entertainer doing great work.

His performance at the inaugural Typo London conference from 20 to 22 October was no exception.

Interspersing witty book jackets for publisher Alfred A Knopf with camp quips, he ended with his latest venture – a 100-page graphic novel, with his beloved Batman drawn by Liverpool artist Dave Taylor. They are only up to page 20, but keep an eye out for it.

Gotham City was an apt choice for Typo London, whose theme was “Places” with a remit way beyond the confines of type weights and kerning.

Morag Myerscough and Spin’s Tony Brook both spoke of “belonging” and the influence of places on creatives.

Myerscough’s work draws on the gutsiness of her native London and local colour. Brooks, a Yorkshireman, meanwhile cited designers from the North of England whose work reflects its blunt sparseness – Peter Saville, Malcolm Garrett and architect John Pawson. But you don’t have to be a designer to be inventive, as Gary Hustwit’s latest movie Urbanized showed.

Typography though, is a way of defining places, as Pentagram’s Michael Bierut’s wayfinding projects for communities and corporations show. Tim Fendley of Applied demonstrated the Legible London system his team devised to make the city more accessible, and Marina Willer of Wolff Olins took us via her native Brazil to badging projects for

Britain’s Tate galleries and London’s cultural South Bank Centre.

Sometimes words aren’t necessary to define place, as Art + Com founder Joachim Sauter showed in stunning kinetic sculptures for BMW and the 2010 Shanghai Expo where 3D imagery tells the story.

But place is also space and nowhere is that more challenging than in the world beyond the screen. Dale Herigstad of Possible Worldwide is shaping New Television by opening up media spaces to create 3D experiences for viewers. Tom Uglow of Google Creative Lab explored the power of digital and ordinary people in Life in a Day – the crowd-sourced movie from Kevin McDonald and Ridley Scott.

There was pure typography – fonts created by BBC World Service to translate the broadcaster’s Global Experience Language across 27 countries devised by Neville Brody’s Research Studios; and Karin von Ompteda’s work, bridging design and science to give a different view of type. But the conference overall showed how creativity is converging to make the world more connected, while preserving individual style.

Nowhere was that more evident than in a show-stopping presentation by King Bansah, a Ghanaian king working as a car mechanic in Germany. His identity, by Julian Zimmermann of Deutsche & Japaner, combines the glitz of royalty with contemporary elegance to help raise cash for his people. Such is the power of design.

– Lynda Relph-Knight

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agi open

2011

mapping the graphic route More than simply being visually appealing, graphic design encompasses the mammoth task of needing to communicate clearly, effectively and sometimes even with a dash of humour.

“What. How. Why?” was the theme of the 2011 AGI Open, which took place in Barcelona from 3 to 4 October.

Collectively, members of Alliance Graphique Internationale are responsible for the some of the world’s most iconic and recognisable graphic design. Now in its 57th year of existence, the club encourages the sharing and exchange of ideas, while striving for graphic design excellence.

As the public and educational face, the AGI Open annually invites students, professionals and graphic design buffs to get a glimpse into the work and minds of the some of the world’s foremost graphic designers. Over the two days of the conference, 26 speakers shared their work, passions, challenges, creative processes and thoughts on the graphic design industry.

The current president of the AGI, Paula Scher’s presentation had the audience captivated. As one of the most prolific female graphic designers working today, a creative career spanning some 40 years has put Scher at the very top of her game. Michael Bierut, Paul Sahre, Marina Willer, Nicholas Blechman, Christoph Niemann and Javier Mariscal, among others, all demonstrated why they too are considered to be the dot of the I and the cross of the T in their fields.

There was a lot of discussion about the possibilities of graphic design, especially in the digital age; the

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purpose of design; and the need for graphic designers to constantly refresh their creativity to ensure that they are producing work that is relevant.

More than mere visual appeal, speakers like William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand, Lars Müller, and Joost Grootens spoke of the need for design to take note of its political, economic and social context to allow it to affect positive change in the world. A call to action perhaps, but definitely points that got the audience thinking beyond interesting visuals.

The “What. How. Why?” theme aside, a commonality that emerged is that graphic designers seem to love maps. If one considers a map to be the ultimate form of visual communication, then of course this makes perfect sense.

The host city, Barcelona, has its own unique graphic identity and robust community of design students, professionals and enthusiasts, which made it the ideal destination for the conference.

Barcelona is also home to design rockstar and AGI member Javier Mariscal, perhaps best known outside of design circles for his design of the mascot for the 1992 Olympic Games, which were held in his city.

Interestingly, it was the legacy of the 1992 Olympic Games that put Barcelona on the world design map.

In preparation for the games, the city underwent a design and infrastructure overhaul in terms of public transport, communication and amenities, which has resulted in a city with a vibrant street culture. – Delia de Villiers

Watch videos from AGI Open 2011 www.designindaba.com/video/agi-open-2011

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The International Advisory Board of the Basque Culinary Centre met in Lima, Peru, from 9 to 11 September 2011. Following three days of sharing opinions, reflections and projects, they penned the following declaration.

We dream of a future in which the chef is socially engaged, conscious of and responsible for his or her contribution to a just and sustainable society.

As members of the International Advisory Board of the Basque Culinary Centre, with a broad range of experiences, we keep dreaming about and reflecting upon the challenges to our profession. It is our hope that these reflections will serve as a reference and inspiration for the young people who will become tomorrow’s chefs.

t a time when society is rapidly changing, our profession must actively respond to new challenges.

The culinary profession of today offers a wide variety of opportunities and trajectories. We chefs remain united by a passion for cooking and share the belief that our work is also a way of life.

For us, cooking offers a world of possibilities, allowing us to freely express ourselves, pursue our interests, and fulfil our dreams.

Indeed, we believe that cooking is not only a response to the basic human need of feeding ourselves; it is also more than the search for happiness.

Cooking is a powerful, transformative tool that, through the joint effort of co-producers – whether we be chefs, producers or eaters – can change the way the world nourishes itself.

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To all of you, we direct this reflection, entitled “An Open Letter to the Chefs of Tomorrow” and signed in Lima on 10 September 2011: Dear chef, In relation to nature: 1. Our work depends on nature’s gifts.

As a result we all have a responsibility to know and protect nature, to use our cooking and our voices as a tool for recovering heirloom and endangered varieties and species, and promoting new ones. In this way we can help protect the Earth’s biodiversity, as well as preserve and create flavours and preparations.

2. Over the course of thousands of years, the dialogue between humans and nature has created agriculture.

We are all, in other words, part of an ecological system. To ensure that this ecology is as healthy as possible, let’s encourage and practice sustainable

production in the field and in the kitchen. In this way, we can create authentic flavour.

In relation to society: 3. As chefs, we are the product of our culture. Each of us is heir to a legacy of flavours, dining customs and cooking techniques. Yet we don’t have to be passive. Through our cooking, our ethics and our aesthetics, we can contribute to the culture and identity of a people, a region, a country. We can also serve as an important bridge with other cultures.

4. We practice a profession that has the power to affect the socioeconomic development of others. We can have a significant economic impact by encouraging the exportation of our own culinary culture and fomenting others’ interest in it. At the same time, by collaborating with local producers and employing fair economic practices, we can generate sustainable local wealth and financially strengthen our communities.

In relation to knowledge: 5. Although a primary goal of our profession is to provide happiness and stir emotions, through our own work and by working with experts in the fields of health and education, we have a unique opportunity to transmit our knowledge to members of the public, helping them, for example, to acquire good cooking habits, and to learn to make healthy choices about the foods they eat.

6. Through our profession, we have the opportunity to generate new knowledge, whether it be something so simple as the development of a recipe or as complicated as an in-depth research project. And just as we have each benefited from the teachings of others, we have a responsibility, in turn, to share our learning.

In relation to values: 7. We live in a time in which cooking can be a beautiful form of selfexpression. Cooking today is a field in constant evolution that includes many different disciplines. For that reason, it’s important to carry out our quests and fulfil our dreams with authenticity, humility and, above all, passion.

Ultimately, we are each guided by our own ethics and values.

Signed: Ferrán Adriá, El Bulli, Spain René Redzepi, Noma Restaurant, Denmark Michel Bras, Bras Restaurant, France Alex Atala, DOM Restaurant, Brazil Gastón Acurio, Astrid & Gastón Restaurant, Peru Yukio Hattori, Japan Mássimo Bottura, Osteria Francescana Restaurant, Italy Dan Barber, Blue Hill, USA Absent: Heston Blumenthal, Fat Duck Restaurant, UK

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Rhubarb by Hel Yes! Photo by Adam Laycock.

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Arctic Hare by Hel Yes! Photo by Adam Laycock.

Besides gearing up for World Design Capital 2012, Helsinki is undergoing a food revolution enabled by the temporary, experimental nature of pop-up restaurants.

Kim Gurney looks to the underlying forces of this worldwide eating fad.

bestowed every two years by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design. On Restaurant Day, anyone can open a restaurant for 24 hours. About 200 temporary venues were created during the August event.

And in November, the World Design Capital crew will host a one-day cake restaurant in the city.

don’t know what’s going on,” says Ville Relander, project manager for the City of Helsinki and responsible for the Finnish capital’s food culture strategy.

“It used to be the most boring place on Earth, with rules and regulations…

And somehow people started to create their own city. ‘Restaurant Day’ is part of this new spirit.”

Relander is referring to the latest popup restaurant craze to hit Helsinki, which is gearing up towards its title as World Design Capital 2012, an award

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“If anyone has ever dreamed about running a restaurant, it’s never been as easy as it is today. You can create your own pop-up restaurant anywhere in the world – in parks, on roofs, wherever. Even on a bicycle!” adds Relander.

Indeed, temporary experimental cook-ups have become something of a performance art, if Helsinki is any cultural barometer. Take the Hel Yes! pop-up restaurant, which made a punchy debut at last year’s London Design Festival. Hosted by Finnish culinary expert Antto Melasniemi, it brought a taste of Nordic forests to the dinner table in a “straightforward and simple” style. Key

Finnish ingredients like fish roe, game and preserved plants were supplemented by daily elements sourced by hunter-gatherers. Pure ingredients and traditional cooking were key, combined with design, lighting, décor and art installations.

In September this year Melasniemi hosted an evening feast in Hel Yes! style at a harbour-side Helsinki venue.

The physical furniture remnants of the restaurant’s first pop-up iteration were literally burning on an open fire at the entrance, a ritualistic act to prepare the ground for its next incarnation, in Stockholm in February.

The fiery gesture somehow typified the creative team behind it: Inspired, conceptual and poignant yet also understated – the reason for the burn was left unexplained to the bustling media contingent. The lower floor of the building played an edgy video installation against a tiled wall; the upper floor read as part-installation, part-restaurant and was soon heaving with chatter, cooking and a string music performance.

Melasniemi, interviewed in feverish post-cooking mode, says the popup food phenomenon is often a ploy used for marketing purposes whereas for the Hel Yes! team, it is a way to perform something with food that would be impossible in a more established, formal environment. “So what we want to do is use it as a platform to experiment with things, which is what pop-up culture is very good for. Just opening a restaurant for two weeks doesn’t make sense unless there is some kind of idea behind it,” he adds.

The pop-up food fad in Helsinki benefits in part from a general resurgence in Finnish food. According to Relander, Finns have the currently embattled Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to thank. In 2001, Berlusconi reportedly said Finland should not host the European Union’s food-safety agency because Finns did not know what prosciutto was. Four years later, then president of France, Jacques Chirac added insult to injury, remarking of the British: “You can’t trust people

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Top left: Hel Yes! kitchen designed by Linda Bergroth.

Bottom left: Exterior of temporary Hel Yes! restaurant.

who cook as badly as that. After Finland, it’s the country with the worst food.”

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Relander says the Finnish were irked into upping their game. “Food culture and restaurant culture was dead five, six, seven years ago but in 2005 we got a wake-up call.” He explains that Finnish food is so strong and intense because of the water, which he rates among the cleanest in the world.

“Finnish food and design is the same,” he adds, “simple, clear and practical.”

around the structure of a musical sonata comprising five movements of “intrigue, participation and excess”.

A mobile Tex Mex canteen roams Los Angeles, only locatable on Twitter. And taking things to new extremes, patrons at the recent summer Edinburgh Festival could not get enough of La Concepta, a daily shifting restaurant with makebelieve food where the dishes were a mix of art, jokes, anecdotes, aphorisms, audio installations and choreographed dance moves.

The pop-up fad is broadly international, however. For instance Argentinian Eloise Alemany is well known for her pop-up restaurant Noches Grimod and store Souvenir in Buenos Aires. Secret Sensory Suppers at September’s London Design Festival included experiential evenings of banqueting in a Masonic Temple. One was shaped

Rather than abating, pop-ups seem to be morphing into ever more creative forms. For instance, a new restaurant to launch in Paris will be a “slow popup” that will last for three years, says Johannesburg-based trend analyst Dion Chang. He reckons the trend is not going away because of a culture of immediate gratification. “You want

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Below: Unique round tables bent from aspen trees designed by Linda Bergroth with Alvar Aalto Artek 403 chairs in three Hel Yes! bespoke colours.

Photos on this spread by Adam Laycock.

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Next spread: Hare Stew by Hel Yes! Photo by Aleksi Niemel채. Art Direction by Mia Wallenius.

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something new, something novel. Laid onto that is a major, major tipping point in terms of homogenous mall culture – we want something to surprise us. We want something that is engaging. Pop-ups are novel and that is what people love. I think we have also cultivated attention spans of lab rats. We get attention deficit disorder and want to move on.”

Social media plays into this novelty dynamic, in particular given that popup venues are often shifting and known only to certain people. Chang, director of Flux Trends, links this aspect to an element of gaming coming into our lives, sometimes in subtle ways. “It’s a new motivation but we are starting to see gaming seep into so many areas of how we do things and how we need that challenge. When you follow things like a little secret group, there’s a huge element of play.” Pop-ups offer a fleeting offline experience while the medium to get there is online – “a beautiful combination of the two”, he adds.

The second major factor Chang highlights driving the pop-up trend is economic: “We are in another major depression economically, so you just see more and more spaces shut down.

People need to try and get a business going but can’t pay exorbitant rent hence the pop-up element.” Overlaid is a shift from a “me” era to a “we” era, Chang adds: “You really have to collaborate and think of innovative stuff for business to go forward in this climate.”

Kim Gurney visited Helsinki during Design Week in September as a guest of World Design Capital Helsinki 2012. She is a freelance journalist and visual artist based in Johannesburg.

Website: www.kimgurney.com

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“Every day 1.5 billion cups of tea are enjoyed throughout the world” and other things that you didn’t know about your food, sourced from a hodgepodge of sources, mostly verified with some found on Facebook.

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Mother’s milk can turn sour when the woman is doing too much sport. hina uses 45 billion chopsticks per C year, which requires 25 million trees to be chopped down to make them.

Crocodiles eat stones so that they can dive deeper. lucodermaphobia is the fear of G the skin on hot milk and puddings.

I n Iran, people colour the chickens, not the eggs during Easter.

hen you rub a sliced onion on your W feet, you will taste onion in your mouth about one hour later.

Nutmeg is deathly when it is taken intravenously. very year Coca-Cola spends as much E money on advertising as it would cost to give one bottle to every family in the world for free.

An average person’s yearly fast-food intake will contain 12 pubic hairs.

Peanut oil can be processed to produce glycerol, which can be used to make nitroglycerin, one of the constituents of dynamite. Note however, there are other processes that can be used to make dynamite without peanuts.

Coconut water can be used (in emergencies) as a substitute for blood plasma. cDonald’s feeds more than 46 million M people a day, more than the entire population of Spain.

One hears worse after an opulent meal.

A Wiener has an electrical resistance of 5 Megaohm.

Every year about 2 000 French people seek medical attention after attempting to open an oyster.

Nutella has a sun protection factor of 9.7.

It has been traditional to serve fish with a slice of lemon since the Middle Ages, when people believed that the fruit’s juice would dissolve any bones accidentally swallowed.

The Snickers chocolate bar was named after the Mars family’s favourite horse. he first sentence ever to be spoken T on a telephone call was: “The horse doesn’t eat cucumber salad.”

An average man of 70 kgs would be enough to prepare a meal for 40 cannibals.

The most-often bought flavour of icecream in the world is vanilla. ne can get drunk from bathing in O alcoholic drinks.

In the Sprengel chocolate factory in Hannover, the women had to sing while working so that they couldn’t eat any chocolate.

The unit of measurement for the heat of chillies is called Scoville.

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When calamari gets excited or stressed, it eats itself.

here are approximately 2 000 T hamburgers per cow, consumed every four seconds by McDonald’s restaurant patrons worldwide.

The all-time record for the farthest a marshmallow has been blown by a nose is 4,96m.

rench fries are the most eaten F vegetable in America.

It’s forbidden to carry the Swedish delicacy Surstöming on Air France and British Airways because it could explode.

According to the USA’s National Onion Association, onion consumption has increased approximately 50% over the past 20 years.

he worldwide agriculture industry T produces enough to feed 12 billion people. But there are still 100 000 humans dying every day from hunger or hunger-related diseases.

The average worldwide consumption of soft drinks is 89.8 litres per person per year.

Each year 50-billion kilograms of food are wasted in the USA. besity and inactivity kill 407 000 O people every year in the USA. Rice is the staple food of more than one-half of the world’s population.

I n the mass production of pigs, there is one square metre for each animal. he colour “orange” was named T after the fruit. Before the fruit, a term “geoluhread” (for “yel-low-red”) was used for the colour.

Some Bedouin weddings serve a camel stuffed with a sheep’s carcass, which is stuffed with chickens, which are stuffed with fish, which are stuffed with eggs.

In Hong Kong 60% of the population eat fast-food at least once a week.

McDonald’s calls people who eat a lot of their food “heavy users”. cDonald’s is the world’s largest M distributor of toys. pinach consumption in the USA rose S 33% after the Popeye comic strip became a hit in 1931.

Ninety-nine percent of pumpkins sold in the USA are for the sole purpose of decoration.

Honey is the only food that does not spoil. Honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs has been tasted by archaeologists and found edible.

Sitophobia is the fear of food.

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Can food bring about world peace? At the very least it can initiate understanding: Kamal Mouzawak, Merijn Tol and Nadia Zerouali recount their experiences in the Middle East to Nadine Botha.

the demand and purchasing power is,” explains the television personality, entrepreneur, chef and writer.

Initially, even today, the souk mostly attracted the foreign, trendy and health aware. The issues at hand were the same food politics the world as a whole is experiencing – a commercial, industrialised food system that has become alienated from the environment it relies on and the consumer it serves.

ur basic message is ‘make food not war’,” says Kamal Mouzawak, founder of the Souk el Tayeb farmers market in Lebanon. “We have more than 47 families who live off this market, united under one roof. If only the entire country was like that,” he goes on.

Mouzawak established the weekly Souk el Tayeb – “tayeb” interchangeably meaning “good”, “tasty” or “lively” – in 2004. It is still the only producer’s market in the Middle East. “It was a move from rural to urban, taking wonderful producers that are doing a great job in their village to where

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The market is Mouzawak’s solution: “You have no intermediaries who take the money and you sell only what you produce, plant or cook. You have direct contact with the consumer and the consumer no longer sees food as a commodity that can be bought with money alone. It is something that somebody has to produce and, if as a consumer you can’t work in a garden or kitchen, at least you have direct contact with the producer, the farmer or the cook to understand that food is not simply a product that money can buy in a supermarket.”

Beyond food politics, on a deeper social level without being heavyhanded, using the simple respect of communal presence, the Souk el

Tayeb has, initially incidentally, come to represent a utopian Lebanon where all cultural divides are put to rest.

“In Lebanon we have many different religious sects with seemingly nothing in common. Except food,” explains Mouzawak. For instance, Christians eat the same festive cookies during Easter as Muslims do for Eid el Kebir. “Muslims and Christians in the north eat the same food. Muslims and Christians in the south eat the same food. The differences are actually regional.”

The first formal expression of this accidental square of cultural peace, to be found in the heart of the Bierut city centre, was the formation of the United Farmers for Lebanon initiative in 2005. On the 30th anniversary of the Lebanon civil war, the farmers of the souk marched and showed a map of Lebanon that replaced the cities with the names of the regional foods.

However, it was when the Souk el Tayeb refused to close down during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war that it really put its money where its – uh – mouth is, as an outpost of apolitical resistance. In trying to ensure the farmers and producers of the souk’s livelihoods, the souk picked up

and travelled to its customers, who were hiding in the mountains.

“A market is the best expression of one’s history, land and tradition,” Mouzawak explains his passion for maintaining this activist tone of the Souk el Tayeb. In 2007 Mouzawak started growing his Souk el Tayeb enterprise to include Food and Feast festivals. The opposite of the rural-tourban motivation of the souk, these weekend festivals were held in small towns that specialised in certain delicacies, attracting the city dwellers.

Due to the fragmentation of the country during the war, many Lebanese have never seen any other part of the country except their own city.

In 2009, Mouzawak also launched the Tawlet – meaning “farmers kitchen” – in Bierut. The Tawlet invites a different rural cook to prepare a buffet of their region’s specialty dishes every day. Patrons can enjoy the food in a restaurant-type setup, but also watch and participate in the cooking.

Speaking to how the initiative has been picked up by the global imagination, the Tawlet has popped up at the Tokyo Design Week as well as in one of the galleries of the Tate Modern.

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Educational programmes for schools, colleges and consumers have also been developed under the auspices of Souk el Tayeb. In addition, the souk itself runs campaigns and special events that encourage recycling, furniture restoration, garage sales and other responsible lifestyle choices.

Every first souk of the month also invites African and Asian workers to present their indigenous foods. “It’s a way to say that everybody has a tradition, everybody has a wonderful tradition, and everybody can go and meet each other at the market,” insists Mouzawak.

Mouzawak is not the only person working in the Middle East who appreciates the value of food in bringing about cultural and personal peace and understanding.

In Annia Ciezadlo’s acclaimed food memoir Day of Honey, she describes living in Iraq during the war and food being the only personal and communal solace to be found in these extreme times.

On a more practical level are Merijn Tol and Nadia Zerouali, two Dutch food and cookbook writers who have become motivated by the Arabia

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region. They have published two cookbooks – Arabia and Bismilla Arabia. These books, like Mouzawak, seek to emphasise the similarities rather than the differences in the region, spanning from Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine in the Middle East; to Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria in the Maghreb; and Andalucia, Sicily, Sardinia and Catalunya in southern Europe.

More than cookbooks however, they are initiating the “Recipes of the Whole Land” project, which is envisioned as a big outdoor eat-in for Israelis and Palestinians in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, West Bank and, if possible, Gaza. Due for Spring 2012, the event will attract consumers, farmers and schoolchildren in sharing recipes, ideas, traditions, gardens and, most importantly, food.

“We are naïve, but on purpose. We believe in the force of sharing food and connecting,” smiles Tol. She quotes Immanuel Kant: “A meal is something of a treaty where you ensure each other safety and life, and are well willing towards each other.”

But, she says: “We add: If I break bread with you, I won’t break your neck as easily.”

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The untapped natural resources of the African continent are not easily assimilated into global food security issues. Michelle Matthews looks to design solutions for turning Africa from basket case to breadbasket.

make this happen. It is relatively underpopulated, and have soils and genetic resources that have not been fully exploited yet. But it also has issues.

There are the big problems: Millions of acres of farmland throughout Africa are leased to foreign investors, usually to grow crops for their own populations in heavily urbanised or desert countries, such as South Korea and the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile, there is famine in the Horn of Africa. n a world of iPads, electric cars and online social networks, it’s almost quaint to remember that for centuries some of humanity’s most revolutionary innovations have been around the growing, processing and transporting of our food. However, as the population increases, food insecurity grows and incidents of contamination become more frequent, it’s time to get innovative about agriculture again.

Africa is one of the most promising and challenging continents to

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However, if the number-one priority is feeding Africans, then there are also the practical, farm-scale problems: Preserving seeds and the genetic diversity they hold; tapping water in water-scarce environments; replenishing soils; educating farmers about disease; getting products to market; diversifying rural livelihoods; and reducing waste and spoilage.

Nonetheless, there is exciting innovation in designing new approaches, systems and products

to help African farmers feed the continent, while lifting themselves out of poverty. As sustainability and architecture specialist Janis Birkeland has said: “Sustainability is a design problem.”

SMS market info Farmers are typically located far from most information resources and infrastructure. Across Africa, but particularly in East African countries such as Kenya, farmers are increasingly able to receive SMSes with valuable information such as crop prices and demand, weather patterns, and the location of seeds and fertilisers.

In the past, farmers would travel great distances to market on harvest day and then take what they could get for their crops. These SMS services allow farmers greater control over where, when and how they sell their produce. Esoko, a relatively new service in the West African country of Ghana, claims 20 to 40% improvements in the revenue of farmers accessing the information.

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Bamboo bikes Small-scale African farmers tend to follow a subsistence model, which leaves them vulnerable to economic shocks. Developing new products using agricultural products can help farmers diversify their livelihoods.

Scientists from the Earth Institute at Columbia University worked with a Ghanaian company to develop a bicycle with a bamboo body. Bamboo is quick growing and remarkably flexible and strong. Light and tough, the Bamboo Bike is well-suited to rural conditions, but there has been so much interest in it internationally that 80% of production is now for overseas markets.

Purchase for profit Food aid is regularly criticised as being little more than the dumping of agricultural surpluses from developed countries, often with detrimental effects on those local markets already struggling to survive.

The World Food Programme’s “Purchase for Profit” initiative links farmers to markets by pooling relief food locally instead of importing it, stimulating the economy in the devastated area and supporting the livelihoods of small-scale farmers.

Appropriate technologies Spoilage is a big problem for African farmers, who are usually far from warehousing facilities and processing plants. Cheap, simple technologies, such as groundnut grinders, can reduce the amount of labour required to get produce into a storable form and allow small farmers to increase their income, creating products that they can sell to others in the community.

Energy from farming Wood is the main source of energy for rural communities, making managing natural forest depletion a challenge.

But there are ways to harness agriculture for more sustainable biomass production. One way is through adjusting farming methods to hark back to traditional approaches.

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For example, the Food and Agriculture Organisation recommends an Integrated Food Energy System: Either agroforestry, where food and energy crops are grown on the same plot of land; or educating farmers on how to use by-products of their farm (such as manure and crop residue) to generate energy. Another way is through using new, smart technologies: Imported machinery that compresses waste biomass into briquettes is also widely used, and locally-built machines are being piloted in countries like South Africa.

Comic education Not all Africans can receive formal education in agriculture and therefore won’t receive information on new techniques that can help them be more successful. Kenyans can learn about sustainable approaches to farming – such as inoculating chickens against disease, fruit drying and seed protection – through the ShujaazFM (meaning “Heroes”) comic carried in the Saturday Nation newspaper, reaching 12 million people a month.

“Lost” crops of Africa Farmers have inter-bred plants and animals to bring out their best characteristics for centuries, turning inedible grass into super-crop maize, for example. But in the process, genetic diversity – and the ability to adapt to shifts like climate change – has been lost.

Africa must remain aware that in the future, when the metals and oil run out, its biodiversity will be its strength.

Solar drip irrigation Drip irrigation – piping that delivers small amounts of water to the roots of plants using gravity via networks of plastic tubing – is one of the most efficient ways of saving water and improving yields. In Africa, it can also free-up labour on small-scale farms, as water no longer has to be collected by hand. However, these systems need some energy input to run and most rural farmers are off the grid. Solar-powered drip irrigation systems installed in Benin have been shown to increase yields, improving the vegetable intake by the families of subsistence farmers who grow plants for household use by 500g to 750g per day.

A drawback of solar is upkeep and potential theft. Simple, locally made devices that can be fixed by the farmers themselves are good solutions too. An example is a foot-powered treadle-pump, manufactured in Zambia and developed by IDE, an international social enterprise using design to solve developmental problems.

Africa, however, hasn’t bred out all its options, which is why institutes like the Grow Biointensive Agriculture Centre of Kenya (G-BIACK) are so important.

They preserve genetic diversity and encourage African farmers to exchange successful heirloom seeds beyond their immediate families.

Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor Design is not always about creating a product, but a system. In Africa, one of the challenges is a lack of coordination between regions, resulting in stifled trade. Tanzania’s new Southern African Growth Corridor is a public-private partnership that looks to link clusters of small-holder farmers with the resources to improve their farming practices and get their produce to market. This allows them to make money off surpluses, and invest in their families and farms.

Desperate farmers can easily be taken in by companies selling genetically modified seeds that have higher yields but do not regenerate, when they should rather be sharing the indigenous crops that perform best within the community. As a continent,

Michelle Matthews is a one-time-publisher turned sustainability consultant who serves up legendary spreads in her dining room.

Her Whole Food Almanac was published in 2009.

Website: www.michellematthews.co.za.

Twitter: @michelle_matt.

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La Tomatina is the biggest food fight in the world.

Held annually in the Valencian town of Bu単ol, Spain, over 150 000 overripe tomatoes are flung around by about 30 000 people in honour of the town's patron saints, St Louis Bertrand and the Virgin Mary. Photo by flydime from flickr.com.

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The topic of food is these days surrounded by questions of sustainability, obesity, sovereignty, ethics, culture, science, innovation, diversity and the future. Design Indaba riled up some designers, artists, chefs, thinkers and food experts with some provocative questions.

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Peter Reinhart is an acclaimed American baker and teacher who came to working in the food industry through ministry work. Through his books and lectures, he promotes bread baking as a spiritual exercise.

We asked him if foodie-ism is gluttony dressed up as ethical sophistication?

This is actually a question I ask myself often because, like so many in the food world, I struggle with gluttony on a daily basis; I simply love food – good, wholesome, locally produced or not – to excess.

The charges are also magnified by the often heard assertion that people in movements like slow food, locovorism, carbon-footprinting, and other food and wine, or gourmet organisations, while all jumping on the green bandwagon or sustainability ark, are actually just looking for a tasty, feelgood, guilt-free meal. There’s nothing wrong with that, actually, but there does seem to be a sort of muddle about where epicurean and ethical pursuits converge.

It would seem clearer and cleaner if a person simply copped to it: “Yeah, I like food, can’t stop searching for the next

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taste sensation even if comes from a nearly extinct bird or a rare jungle cat’s organ.” But no, it doesn’t work that way because most people don’t live on the extreme edges and, in their hearts, want to do the right thing.

that debate, as the sin of sins). So, perhaps, a little guilt inducement is not a bad thing if warranted and if it ultimately leads to a good thing. The real question is, does it?

Let’s face it, we all eat to live and many of us live to eat. So yes, we do dress it up, even if sincerely, in a type of ethical sophistication that justifies whatever drives us on our gluttonous food quests. Whether we call it the celebration of artisans, sustainability, organic, the protection of pure flavours, fair trade – whatever – if we’re able to get involved in such pursuits, we’re probably also part of the small community of people from the First World who contribute to the problems in the first place.

Amy Franceschini, designer, artist and pollinator of Futurefarmers in California, sent Via Campesina’s seven principles of food sovereignty in response to the question of whether food can create world peace:

The whole purpose of sin, as I understand it in its historical and theological context, is to arouse a sense of guilt and remorse for our fallen, less-than Godly state, and drive us toward a pursuit of something holier – or, in today’s terms, wholier.

Gluttony was, and is, one of the cardinal sins and many wise men have written that it may be at the root of all sin (though pride usually wins

Via Campesina coined the term “food sovereignty” to refer to a policy framework advocated by a number of farmers, peasants, pastoralists, fisher folk, indigenous peoples, women, rural youth and environmental organisations, namely the claimed “right” of peoples to define their own food, agriculture, livestock and fisheries systems, in contrast to having food largely subject to international market forces. Via Campesina’s seven principles of food sovereignty include: 1. Food: A basic human right. Everyone must have access to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food in sufficient quantity and quality to sustain a healthy life with full human

dignity. Each nation should declare that access to food is a constitutional right and guarantee the development of the primary sector to ensure the concrete realisation of this fundamental right.

2. Agrarian reform. A genuine agrarian reform is necessary, which gives landless and farming people – especially women – ownership and control of the land they work, and returns territories to indigenous peoples. The right to land must be free of discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, race, social class or ideology; the land belongs to those who work it.

3. Protecting natural resources. Food sovereignty entails the sustainable care and use of natural resources, especially land, water, seeds and livestock. The people who work the land must have the right to practice sustainable management of natural resources and to conserve biodiversity free of restrictive intellectual property rights.

This can only be done from a sound economic basis with security of tenure, healthy soils and reduced use of agro-chemicals.

4. Reorganising food trade. Food is first and foremost a source of nutrition

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Photo by Kasuga Sho.

and only secondarily an item of trade.

National agricultural policies must prioritise production for domestic consumption and food self-sufficiency.

Food imports must not displace local production nor depress prices.

5. Ending the globalisation of hunger.

Food sovereignty is undermined by multilateral institutions and by speculative capital. The growing control of multinational corporations over agricultural policies has been facilitated by the economic policies of multilateral organisations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Regulation and taxation of speculative capital and a strictly enforced Code of Conduct for Multinational Corporations (TNCs) is therefore needed.

6. Social peace. Everyone has the right to be free from violence. Food must not be used as a weapon. Increasing levels of poverty and marginalisation in the countryside, along with the growing oppression of ethnic minorities and indigenous populations, aggravate situations of injustice and hopelessness.

The ongoing displacement, forced urbanisation, oppression and increasing

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incidence of racism of smallholder farmers cannot be tolerated.

7. Democratic control. Smallholder farmers must have direct input into formulating agricultural policies at all levels. The United Nations and related organisations will have to undergo a process of democratisation to enable this to become a reality. Everyone has the right to honest, accurate information, and open and democratic decision-making. These rights form the basis of good governance, accountability and equal participation in economic, political and social life, free from all forms of discrimination.

Rural women, in particular, must be granted direct and active decisionmaking on food and rural issues.

Shin-ichi Takemura is a Japanese anthropologist and philosopher turned media producer, who harnesses the power of the internet to develop social information platforms. "Tangible Earth" is a multimedia globe showing realtime data about the world.

Because food is something that affects us all, does that make us all eating designers?

Humans (and all life organisms) continuously disorganise and recreate themselves. Every day in our body, some hundreds of billions of new cells are being born and replace old cells. Thus you are not what you were a minute ago. As we are the very “process” of such metabolisms (not an identical entity), we are inevitably “what we eat” and “how we eat”. You are unconsciously designing yourself every day through designing your eating activity.

near future due to the skyrocketing oil price, food shortages and the global spread of urban agriculture (as a selfdefence against the food crisis).

Is the purpose of eating design only to manage weight and biological health concerns?

We have long underestimated the creativity of life and our body in the “mechanistic” worldview. We need to redefine the whole concept of nutrition and food in a more holistic and contextual manner.

How can emerging economies’ increasing desire for milk and meat be redesigned?

Increasing food-miles (we eat the whole globe everyday), excessive dependence on fast-food, eating too much meat and all those other problems that are not good for our bodies or Earth, will disappear in the

Christien Meindertsma is a Dutch product and graphic designer, and strict vegetarian. She spent three years researching all the ways pigs are used in society for her book Pig 05049:

Is sustainable always sustainable?

I don’t appreciate the word “sustainable”. Life is in fact not sustaining itself but incessantly “recreating” and “rejuvenating” itself.

I would like to make this world more “creative” rather than “sustainable”.

The biggest problem with the current food system is that it is not transparent. It is a highly complex system that is not logical energy- or health-wise. It is just mostly about making money. We don’t know what we eat so therefore we don’t know what we eat means, for ourselves but also for the food sources. It is super important that we learn what it is that we eat because our food choices can change for the better.

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Photo by Myra Kohn.

Bruce Nussbaum is a lecturer at Parsons The New School in New York, and a world-renowned creative economy thinker and writer. He says: Food is at the cutting edge of design in New York City. The design of tastes, the redesign of the look of food, and the localisation of food sourcing puts the concept of “food” in the social and political centre of conversation.

Yes, ethical eating is a form of political expression. It is also a form of economic development – taking food away from big corporations and bringing it back to local farmers, farmers-market retailers and “slow” eaters (as in the “slow food” movement), who all want to enjoy the taste of what sustains them.

The best thing about future food is that we will know who grows it – in fact, we will participate in its growth.

Claire Renard is part of the French product design studio 5.5 designers, who sought to embody the natural state of ice in their Christmas cake for Häagen-Dazs. Food is one of Renard’s favourite topics. She says:

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You can say that it depends on your culture, who you are and where you come from as to what your food culture is. For some it is vital, for others, food is above all a pleasure, and yet others try to control it. But what is surprising about food, is that you can also be all these people! It depends on the value that you grant at the time…

Monday, you stuff yourself with a sandwich in the metro between two meetings. Wednesday evening, you appreciate sharing good food with family. Thursday, you read an article about the benefits of soya in a magazine and you decide to take care of your body. Saturday, you’ve forgotten the soya and go try a new meat restaurant with friends. Followed by a boring Sunday evening with nothing in the fridge, but you need to eat…

Kim O’Donnel is a trained chef, online food personality and longtime journalist whose catchy book title says it all: The Meat Lover’s Meatless Cookbook. A vegetarian cookbook not pitched at vegetarians, its 52 meals suggest an environmentally

and personally healthy alternative once a week. We asked the American if people should be talking about food, nutrition or eating?

We should be talking about all three, but there’s something missing from your question: Cooking!

In the developed world, we’re talking about food – and watching it being prepared on television – at unprecedented levels. But for too many of us, cooking has been relegated to the junk file of our lives – the everyonce-in-a-while, dust-it-off exception to the rule. Just half of American adults cook at home, for about 30 minutes a day. This is not a new phenomenon; the needle on everyday home cookery has been stuck since 2003 (when the USA Bureau of Labour Statistics began compiling its annual Time Use Survey).

As a result, we have fallen into a collective coma, a legion of unwittingly passive spectators that will eat anything set in front of us, no questions asked.

By taking a pass at the stove, we have been elbowed out of the table, headed by genetically modified corn and soya barons with really big appetites for big money and little-to-zero interest

in protecting the soil, the animals, the workers and the ever-hungry consumer.

Here’s what happens when we cook: We ignite our five physical senses. We wake up the muscles in our hands and eyes. We discover how things work and the consequences of our actions. We learn how high the heat must be for oil to sizzle but not too high or the oil will burn. We get creative and paint with our food, blending colours, textures and aromas. We become nurturing, feeding our loved ones and ourselves.

We directly experience the benefits of our practice. We talk less, yet we have a voice. We participate in the process.

Martin Hablesreiter is one half of Austrian design duo Honey and Bunny, with Sonja Stummerer. Although they work in architecture, product and exhibition design, their primary focus and interest is in food design. Recently they published the book Food Design XL (see page 124).

Why do we think we need added vitamins?

Because people tell us and because we are irritated with the food we eat. As omnivores we have the dilemma that we do not know what’s good for us.

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And it’s one of the most stupid things that 50 years ago people knew what was good.

Should we be talking about food, nutrition or eating?

Yes, it should be one of the most important topics we talk about. It’s much more important than banks or insurance – no money is bad but you can survive, no food means no life. People should talk about food as an aspect of culture, as the most important good, as business, as a design product of daily life… It’s not good that the USA president’s wife is dealing with food, while he does the “important politics”; food is the most important good we deal with!

Laetitia Wolff is a design writer, curator and strategist, and the newly appointed executive director to desigNYC, a non-profit organisation with a mission to improve the lives of New Yorkers through the power of design. As part of her expoTENtial series of 10 urban interventions through design labs, she presented “Value Meal: Design and (over)Eating”.

The best thing about future food is that it will re-educate the foodies themselves about realising that we

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need to think about alternative sources of food, other than what Mother Nature can (or cannot any longer provide), and hope that genetically modified food will not be dangerous but will make progress like other industries. The crucial point remains that our tastebuds still need to be happy, challenged and stimulated.

The food of the future is something made with natural waste.

Sita Bhaumik is a food-obsessed interdisciplinary artist, educator and writer born and raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles to Indian and Japanese Colombian parents. Her work Dust entails intricate sugar and curry patterns laid out on sidewalks.

Because food is something that affects us all, does that make us all eating designers?

Yes, and I’m also a neuroscientist because I have neurons.

Is food culture, diet or money more important?

Culture and money determine diet, but there’s no amount of money that will convince us to eat things that are

culturally taboo (meat, pork, beef, milk, offal, insects, each other). We are what we eat – and what we don’t eat.

Can food create world peace?

Absolutely. It boggles my mind, but contemporary famines are manmade.

While we might declare a war on hunger, we must also remember that hunger is a wartime strategy. If famines are bound up with violence, war and genocide, then the opposite must be true: If food is necessary for survival, then it is also necessary for peace.

Anna Maria Orru is an architect and systems thinker based in Stockholm. Specialising in ecologically responsible design, in 2010 she developed the Foodprints biologically-centred food toolkit for the city of Stockholm. On the question of designing food culture she says: Imagine a food culture inspired by nature’s way of organising itself ie experiential, ecologically-responsible, accessible and artistic. The food culture of the future will need to be resilient and our food systems will be able to withstand shock from outside forces

and not unravel, as they currently do, and fall to pieces.

So how can we design a resilient food culture? It is one that is designed to behave like a natural ecosystem in itself, leaving nothing for granted and no waste trail. Everything is used, absorbed and cascaded as nutrients for other species to be fed from.

Nature is already offering us these design solutions through her 3.8 billion years of research and development.

Just take a look around you and see how she has closed loops on her “food”.

In such a world, food becomes a language and a form of communication. Our food systems are shaped by culture, climate, geography, human interaction, quality of life and pleasure. You can measure a city's resilience and sustainability based on how it feeds itself. In this food culture, we see food as a measure of sustainability, quality of life, state of ecosystem and cultural identity.

We also see it as our “fuel”, where its precious kilojoules drive our decision making when it comes to food systems, accessible to all people and species.

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Anne Mieke Eggenkamp is executive chairwoman of Eindhoven Design Academy, which has educated many of the European eating designers.

What’s the biggest problem with the current food system?

It is not about sharing and collaborating, but about taking and individualism.

Why do we eat shrimps but not insects?

We do not like the sound of eating them.

How can designers feed the world?

Our challenge today is to build bridges with those we identify as having ideas we want to share. In this complex, uncertain world it is increasingly difficult for people and organisations to find their own way.

Designers create products, services, systems and environments that are now part of the ongoing dialogue about human life and design. They help us understand the world we are living in and how they will shape the future. Nurturing design students to be conscious and responsive, and to have empathy with what is going on around them and with the people whom they are designing for.

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Janina Loeve is a Dutch product designer with a special interest in furniture and food. She believes that design is about personality and value to everyday objects, emphasising materials, tradition, quality and sustainability. We asked her if the purpose of eating design is only to manage weight and biological health concerns?

John Thackara is the founder and director of the Doors of Perception event company that organises alternative festivals in Europe and India in which grassroots innovators work with designers to imagine sustainable futures. According to Thackara, the biggest problem with the current food system is too much innovation:

No. Most people around the world don’t have to worry about having enough food to stay alive, while our body is still programmed to deal with times of scarcity. So health has stayed an issue, because of the amount of good food that is often easily accessible.

Most innovation in the food business means turning a cheap thing into an expensive thing – and an unhealthy thing at that. Healthy food – freshfrom-the-field food, whole-until-thekitchen food – loses nutritional quality, and gains sugars and fats, with each “value-adding” innovation process it’s subjected to. The direct consequence of all this innovation is a diabetes pandemic that’s growing in the USA by a terrifying 30% a year.

But food also has a role in our social life and we relate it to our identity.

We are often much more driven to eat by these issues. In this context food design can make a change. If we can change the way we look at and experience different kinds of food, it can also change our health and maybe even have a positive influence on sustainability. Eating design can teach us more about the possibilities and make the right choices more seductive. Good food is much more beautiful!

Fast Company recently named PepsiCo “the world’s most innovative company in food”, but chose to ignore the fact that over one third of the added sugars that are killing Americans come from sweetened carbonated beverages. And what has the response of designers been? Many are doing good business in the development of Personal Health Planning tools, “high-

end wellness” services, superfoods and remote diagnostics – all of which are distractions from the root causes of this grim disease.

Designers should focus on one question only: Right now, if I spend $10 on food in a supermarket, the farmer gets 60 cents; how might we rearrange things so that I pay $2 direct to the farmer for the same food?

Han Feng is fashion designer based in Shanghai and New York, who is renowned for finding the elegance in cultural fusion. But fashion is not her only passion, don’t even get her started on food…

Because food is something that affects us all, does that make us all eating designers?

We are all eating and food designers.

There is beauty in everything we eat, from the basic ingredients to the multitude of flavours. We all have different palettes, thus translating into a collection of sorts. There are ingredients and combinations of dishes that we prefer with each season, but we all have staples that we always return to that defines our signature

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Photo by Jen Munkvold. Courtesy of Blue Hill Farm.

style, in a way. The joy of food allows for even those who are far removed from the world of design and arts, to incorporate a sense of beauty and design into their daily lives.

Can you design food culture? What would you include?

I would love to! It would be a blend of all cultures in one. The premise would be a healthy, fresh and satisfying experience. The culture would include everything from the ingredients to the actual dishes to the utensils to the dinnerware. Everything would be borrowed from a different part of the world. For example, I would come up with a tool that is the fusion between a fork and chopsticks. I would use Indian spices in an Italian dish. I would make sure that the flavours are a mix of something familiar with something new to the palette. The possibilities are truly endless. It would be sheer magic!

Dan Barber is an American chef impassioned by sustainable eating.

Coming to be known as a chef-thinker, his approach to food and agricultural innovation at his Blue Hill farm and restaurant is very hands-on. He has presented at the World Economic

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Forum and served on President Barack Obama’s Council on Physical Fitness, Sports and Nutrition. He knows what he’s talking about: In the past 100 years, agribusiness has become the central pump of our food system, replacing diversity with specialisation, interrelation with linear thinking, community networks with consolidation. It’s broken farming into its component parts – monocultures, animal feedlots – all in the pursuit of producing more food. It’s centralised, siloed and single-minded, leaving out all of nature’s frustrating complexities.

And for the future it won’t service.

We need to adopt a radically new conception of agriculture – a whole new design for the way we grow our food. And we can start by looking to nature for solutions, farming in service to the ecology rather than in opposition to it. Embrace the complexity of the natural world – that’s a blueprint for the best tasting food.

Daljit Singh is better known as one of London’s leading digital creative directors and one of the founders of the iconic company Digit. Now

he heads up the interactive design agency Conran Singh and nurses his passion for his grandfather’s Bangras – a north Indian take on pork bangers, which he has packaged into an awardwinning brand.

Because food is something that affects us all, does that make us all eating designers?

No. Is the guy in Dalston who drops the KFC bones on the floor an artist?

But any food created with love could be argued to be design.

Can food create world peace?

No, not while religion and football stand in the way!

Why do we eat shrimps but not insects?

Who’s we? Plenty of people eat insects; they just might struggle to email their opinion over. It’s cultural; we’re brought up to be scared of insects here.

Vince Frost is a multi-faceted Sydney-based graphic designer. The India Cookbook that he designed for Phaidon was recognised as the best Indian cookbook in the world by Gourmand earlier this year.

Basically if people ate the amount they are meant to with each meal, which is your fist size, then there would be a lot less waste in the world. Less obesity and less pressure on agriculture and hospitals. Grow local (if possible) and eat seasonal. The future is sharing.

Avoid chain stores.

Gidon Eshel is a physics professor at Bard College in New York who can mathematically argue for more vegetables than meat. Although Eshel now punches out the numbers regarding the environmental impact of USA diets in terms of energy, greenhouse gasses and resource consumption, he grew up on a dairy farm.

Is sustainable always sustainable?

Absolutely not. First, “local” almost always requires more greenhouse gas emissions, more land and often much heavier doses of agrochemicals.

Second, grass-fed beef, which is sometimes sold to the uninitiated as more environmentally-sound than regular beef, requires between 10 and 100 times more resources (land, reactive nitrogen, water, greenhouse gas emissions) than such viable

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Photo by Onny Carr.

alternatives as pork, dairy or eggs.

Beef in particular is environmentally offensive no matter what label you may put on it.

What’s right with mass production?

Its efficient use of finite resources.

Does in vitro meat have a soul?

No more than Michele Bachmann does.

Marcel Dicke is head of the entomology laboratory at Wageningen University in The Netherlands. In 2007 he received the NWO-Spinoza award, also known as the Dutch Nobel prize.

He promotes the idea that instead of mammals, we should be eating insects: Why we eat shrimps but not insects is an interesting question only for those living in Europe and North America.

Shrimps and lobster are considered a delicacy in these continents. Locusts are a delicacy to many in Africa and Asia. Locusts have six legs and live on land; shrimps have 10 legs and live in water. Both are arthropods.

A locust is nutritionally highly comparable to beef, containing high levels of proteins, the right fatty acids,

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minerals and vitamins. In contrast to the large amount of feed needed to produce a pound of beef (10 to 1), it takes only a fraction of feed to produce a pound of locusts (10 to 8).

In fact, there is no reason whatsoever why we should not eat locusts. In Australia some people recognise this and call locusts “sky shrimps”. In fact, locusts are one of 1 800 insect species that are eaten as a delicacy somewhere on the globe.

Frank Tjepkema is a Dutch product designer who does a lot of work on restaurant interiors. In 2009 however, he conceptualised Oogst – three selfsufficient farming systems for different sized communities. He presented it as part of the Design Indaba Protofarm 2050 project.

Can you design food culture?

Yes you can, Ferran Adrià and McDonald’s have both influenced food culture by design. I’m taking two extremes because you have to include every manifestation of food culture in the discussion. Companies such as McDonald’s should be part of your scope, even if we consider that

McDonald’s represents the enemy of “good” culture.

Will the city kids’ idea of milk coming from factories come true one day?

It’s very possible, but it’s not bad news per say. Synthesising food may offer a lot of benefits for both humans and animals. It’s too easy to dismiss it as inhuman. Either we limit world population by birth control (also controversial) or we rethink our food resources. Yes there should always be natural milk available, and kids should know where natural milk comes from...

But does 100% of our milk need to be natural? Why? Can eating design go beyond the restaurant?

Everything is connected in the food chain. I believe that as a consumer, you are responsible for the way the food you eat is produced. The simple act of consuming is never innocent. I also acknowledge that it’s very hard to feel connected to this responsibility, it’s so easy to just consume blindly and in a sense we are blind. Blinded by commercials, brands, globalisation etc. More transparency and connection will help us feel more responsible. Here food design can definitely help!

Barton Seaver is an American chef who has distinguished himself for his proactive advocacy for conscientious seafood practices. A National Geographic fellow since 2010, he has developed a list of ocean-friendly substitutes, and a consumer guide that evaluates seafood based on health and environmental impact. He doesn’t think sustainable is always sustainable: Our consumer choices are only truly sustainable if they actively encourage unsustainable products to become better. It is not enough to eat and do no harm, we must eat to incentivise and capitalise positive change across the board. We can use our voices as consumers – our wallets – to actively support companies that are innovating new methods to help restore ecosystems, communities and economies – even if their products are not necessarily recognised as “sustainable”. In fact, we should change the conservation lexicon altogether – from “sustainability” to “restoration”. Restorative food moves us out of the nebulous dichotomy of sustainability and into a more nuanced, evolving and dynamic space that recognises and rewards incremental improvement.

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Emilie Baltz is a multidisciplinary creative who describes her Junk Foodie cookbook as a “parody of American cuisine”. Based in the USA, her Food Bank project entails a mobile sound booth that records people’s food memories with the intention of creating an oral archive of consumption nostalgia.

This can be done through increased communication in the media (ad campaigns, marketing, etc) as well as in school systems. Engaging our young generations in the joy of growing their own food and understanding where it comes from is the foundation to a sustainable future.

Should we be talking about food, nutrition or eating?

Eating. This is an action. This is behaviour. This is what needs changing.

Annelies Hermsen from The Netherlands has worked on numerous food design projects, experimenting with juxtaposing cultures, reinventing readymades, interactive cocktails and bare minimum luxury. She thinks that in the future we will only eat what we need.

Can you design food culture?

What would you include?

For centuries food culture has been designed by rituals and traditions. I would include more actions around growing and sharing food within communities. This would lay a foundation for healthy ecosystems, both environmentally and socially.

How can emerging economies’ increasing desire for milk and meat be redesigned?

I think reverse psychology is not used often enough. In order for milk and meat to become less desirable, vegetables, fruits, seeds and grains need to become more desirable.

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It’s an already well-known fact that if you practise sport you need to eat more carbs than others. But why do we people eat so much extra food while we don’t use its energy?

Many food producers tell us on the packaging how many calories there are in a food product but they don’t tell us what we need to do to burn the energy it gives us. One candy bar is 270 kcal, for which you’ll need to climb the stairs for 30 minutes to make sure you use this energy before it turns to fat in your body.

Jesper Johansson is a chef and works with “meal events”, education and research in the Culinary Arts and Meal Science department of Örebro University in Sweden. His research has led to numerous interactive lectures and sensory meals.

Does in vitro meat have a soul?

No, that’s maybe why we should not play god and produce crazy products.

What is the food of the future?

Food that is not everyday, food that runs out, so that we have to choose differently and creatively, making us curious to try new recipes. What if the guests at a restaurant or grocery store in the future could be happy when the food they buy or order is finished and they have to choose something else?

Zoe Coombes and David Boira constitute the New York furniture, art and design studio Cmmnwlth.

Harnessing a new fluidity enabled by machine languages, their interests are as material and emotional as they are technical. Coombes feels that food culture has a lot to teach other creative fields:

What’s remarkable about “eating” in all its forms – from snacks and restaurant food, to home cooking – is the amount of diversity we tolerate in our food. We get excited by the most radical heirloom tomatoes and are happy to combine them with anchovies – an animal that grows in an entirely different environment from the tomato.

We order in Indian food one night then have ham sandwiches with pickles the next day.

At the same time, there is a quasiobsession in architecture, interiors and furniture on what is the “best use”, the most efficient material, that single part that pulls the whole thing off, which can be very reductive.

I’ve noticed that people rarely look at their plate and ask: “Oh lord, why did you use this material? Couldn’t you have chosen a more efficient ingredient? Isn’t it wasteful to use these five oysters, when really you could have used 12 olives instead?”

When it comes to eating, there’s a general recognition that we are designed to be omnivorous. Most of us desire a range of flavours and forms on our plate.

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Variety, when it comes to our bodies is seen as healthy, rather than excessive.

Unusual palettes aren’t ghettoised as “not-design” or “something-more-likeart”. Instead, we accept that the role of food is broader than a precisely tweaked, hyper-efficient road for vitamins and calories. As long as it delivers those vitamins in some way, it’s good enough.

What if we thought of our products through that lens? The ergonomic handle that fits the hand in a variety of places. The material palette that was “strong enough” for the job, and accepted erotic fats and folds, even “mistakes” as part of its “performance”?

As we slowly begin to find ways of integrating more efficient technologies into our lighting, walls and tabletops, there are many practices and products that we simply need to give up, if we are to continue to coexist on this planet. However, variety, and our pleasure-fuelled quest for multitudes (multitudes of good things, we say!) is not what needs to go.

Jennifer Rubell is an American artist who creates participatory art,

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often staggering in scale, sensually arresting, and employing food and drink as media. For instance: 1 ton of ribs with honey dripping on them from the ceiling; 2 000 hard-boiled eggs with a pile of latex gloves nearby to pick them up; 1 521 doughnuts hanging on a free-standing wall (detail shown above); a room-sized cell padded with 1 800 cones of pink cotton candy. She says: The biggest problem with current food culture is that women are no longer at home in the kitchen.

Making food from scratch at home used to be a job and there was a person assigned to do it. We thought we could delegate that job to restaurants and food companies, but in fact the job was a really complex and interesting one, with a lot of moral and ethical pitfalls, and corporations are probably the entities least likely to perform it well. So now, instead of having someone who loves us making our food, we have people who don't even know us making it. Obviously, women wanted to get out of the kitchen in the worst way, and I’m happy we did, but the void we left is real, and I don't see anyone filling it anytime soon.

Dan Ariely does behavioural economics research at Duke University in the USA and tries to explain it in plain language. His primary interest is the unwittingly irrational behaviour that humans display. Having sought to come to the root of it and to turn irrationality into a positive through two books, most recently The Upside of Irrationality, Ariely thinks that we can all design our eating if we understand our environment.

One of the biggest lessons from social sciences over the past 50 years has been that our actions are not so much due to our internal preferences and thoughtful decisions, but in fact due to the environment in which we are placed. This has both negative and positive effects.

So, for example, if we are placed in an environment that tempts us – think about a restaurant and the waiter coming with the dessert tray and the chocolate soufflé smell just entering our nostrils and getting us to crave it… Under those conditions, we are likely to be tempted. Or if we go to a supermarket and the smell of freshly baked goods is pumped into the supermarket, and a few tasty, sweet,

salty, fattening pieces of food are on display, what are the odds that we will be able to overcome our temptation and eat something healthy? Not that much.

Those are the downsides of not being in full control of our decisions and being influenced by the environment.

But there’s also some things that we do have some control over, like the environment in our homes. Firstly, it turns out that the food that we buy is the food that we are going to consume. So if we end up buying things that are more healthy, we can actually consume things that are more healthy.

Secondly, more interestingly, we can also think about the nuances of design and think, for example, about something like the refrigerator. I think the current design of the refrigerator is not very compatible with human beings. Most refrigerators have two opaque drawers at the bottom to store fruit and vegetables. We do not see them because they are opaque and at the bottom, not front and centre when we open the refrigerator. As a consequence, when we open the refrigerator and think about what we

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are going to eat, these are not the things that jump to mind.

What if we understood that and reversed it? What if we took fattening unhealthy things and put them in the bottom two drawers?

What if we took the healthier stuff, the fruit and vegetables, and put it front and centre? I think this would cause less of us to have rotting fruit and vegetables, but it will also make the fruit and vegetables spring to mind more easily when you open the refrigerator, making it more likely that you will eat them.

On top of that, if we understood our laziness and understood that sometimes a one-minute delay can be the difference between eating something healthy and something not healthy, maybe we would prewash, pre-peal or prepare the fruit and vegetables so that it doesn’t even take an extra minute to get them ready.

Under those conditions, the environment might actually help us behave better. At the end of the day, we all have some control; we can design the environment in which we make decisions to some degree. If

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we understand how important this environment is, we might be able to make better decisions.

Brent Richards is an architect, designer and polymath specialising in sensory and food design, who has previously consulted for Heston Blumenthal. He is CEO and creative director at the Design Embassy Europe creative consultancy.

“Expectation plays an enormous part in our experience of food, but the result tastes absolutely delicious, and it offers an insight into how we approach what we eat,” writes Heston Blumenthal about his signature snail porridge in his 2008 The Big Fat Duck Cook Book.

Food is culture and everything has to do with food in one way or another; agriculture, economy, medicine, science and technology, even our social fabric, can be considered an active embodiment of our relationship to food. Whether in times of famine or plenty, food culture influences how, where, when and what we eat.

The act of eating, of consumption, is both deeply personal at an emotional

and physical level, and as a shared act on the communal and collective level, as well as a true manifestation of our human sensibility to interact and bond. The shared act of eating unifies both our rituals and customs, and fundamentally influences our daily happiness and longer term well-being.

However, we should distinguish between the “need for daily sustenance” and the “wish for nourishment”, to better understand the difference between our needs and desires. The fact that we all eat, does not make us all designers of food, though we individually may be cooks, chefs, connoisseurs and, in some cases, gastronomes.

The act of design is more than simply about interaction and participation. It’s about overview, critical analysis and aesthetic appreciation; an overarching understanding and awareness of using aesthetic aptitude to configure, arrange and present food in an imaginative attractive fashion. To imbue food products with values and a relationship to origin and process, to communicate and package food stuffs in an intriguing and authentic manner, and to facilitate and heighten the

relationship between nature, cooking and eating… That is eating design.

Jason Drew is a serial entrepreneur who, having retired early after two heart attacks became a passionate environmentalist. He’s lived in South Africa for about 10 years now and recently published The Protein Crunch, which he co-wrote with David Lorimer.

We live in a world where an exploding population is over exploiting our ecosystems. Every day there are 100 million acts of sexual intercourse, 370 000 children are born and 170 000 of us die. That means that every evening 200 000 more of us sit down for supper than had breakfast that morning. As more demand meets less supply from our damaged ecosystems, prices rise causing civil unrest – as we have seen across the world in recent years – causing state failure in the horn of Africa, and regime change in the Middle East.

Wars over the ability to produce food may underline our uncertain future as humans. Food insecurity has led China and Saudi Arabia to buy more farmland in Africa than exists in France. With 1 billion people obese or overweight

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and a further billion people hungry or starving, something is not working.

We have the intellect and ability to destroy the planet on which we all depend and also the skills to fix what we have broken.

Neil Stemmet is a Cape Town interior designer, collector and curator, who has received acclaim for his timeless, earth-friendly projects.

Author of cookbook Sout en Peper, he is also known for his restaurant designs like Cuvee and the Van Niekerk Tasting Lounge at Simonsig, and Towerbosch Earth Kitchen at Knorhoek Wine Estate. We asked him how designers can feed the world?

Designers, editors and architects reflect public knowledge. By understanding the importance of our role and being conscious about our design ethos, we can help to change the world. We should all make home-grown food, even in pot plant containers, a way of life. Imagine sweet cherry tomatoes picked from your balcony, or crisp courgettes – it is possible, you can grow potatoes in a garbage container. We should encourage neighbourhood allotments

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where we grow vegetables and fruit as a community, and show children that from a seed you can grow a harvest of the sweetest peas. Do neighbourhood get-togethers in our allotments and cook a meal, with only earth harvest; share the joy and the sun, and create happy memories

Sarah Emily Duff is a Cape Townbased historian, writer and occasional freedom-of-information activist. She blogs at “Tangerine and Cinnamon” and is interested in histories of age, the body, food and consumerism.

Is foodie-ism gluttony dressed up as ethical sophistication?

Foodie-ism is more than gluttony.

While there have always been people with a more-ardent-than-normal enthusiasm for food, foodie-ism is different. The term “foodie” was coined during the early 1980s to satirise yuppies whose intensely selfconscious food worship transformed their ingredients, cooking and utensils into badges of middle-class honour.

Foodie-ism is snobbery, rather than gluttony. Foodie-ism mystifies cooking and eating, elevating them to experiences that can only be

appreciated properly by appropriately trained foodies, and it judges those who eat less well. Foodies, then, don’t really care that much about food and eating.

Why do we think we need added vitamins?

We take vitamin supplements because the food industry tells us to. When scientists identified vitamins and minerals in food at the beginning of the 20th century, they observed that some diseases – like scurvy – could be treated by upping vitamin intake and that some people with compromised or delicate health – like pregnant women or the very old – benefitted from vitamin supplements. But there’s no need for otherwise healthy adults who eat good diets to take supplements. That’s why the food and nutrition industries use advertising to convince unsuspecting consumers that they need to buy “vitaminenriched” products. They don’t.

Richard Carstens is the multiaward winning chef at the Tokara Restaurant outside Stellenbosch. He served up a lauded tribute meal to Ferran Adrià on 30 July this year. We

asked him whether ethical eating has become a form of political expression?

Yes, it has and it should. Ethical eating should no longer be viewed as a hippie notion of “should I eat meat or vegetables?” The food we eat is linked to politics; think agriculture, genetic modification of crops, genetic pollution of species and food security. We all need to start informing ourselves more and make the right food choices.

Ethical eating doesn’t simply mean understanding whether the vegetables you are eating are sustainable or organic and your beef grass-fed. More importantly, it is about learning to understand biodiversity, extinction of species and environmental impact. The food choices we are making in relation to this can’t only be about great packaging, merchandising and in-store lighting. It has to be more informed, we have to think of the future.

Reuben Riffel is one of South Africa’s most prolific chefs, with his flagship Reuben's restaurant in Franschhoek, as well as the Robertson

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Small Hotel and Cape Town One & Only. He is a household name.

Is food culture, diet or money more important?

Tradition, it seems, has never been more important than now. I’ve come to realise that many of the traditions that you grow up with are also necessary in terms of building your character and really who we are.

Food culture plays a big part in this; unfortunately the hunger of money has made many traditions null and void. Of the many traditions I grew up with, the traditions that included food and eating are more memorable. Food culture brings us closer to nature and it teaches us that food is more than just a necessity, but also allows us to bond and find out about each other.

There is nothing better for me than to brag and show off our food tradition to foreigners and allow them to discuss theirs. All over the world, my friendships with people have started and evolved during the discussion around our food cultures. Dieting and money was invented by humans, healthy eating and knowing when enough is enough, when it comes to food and money, will make our world a better place.

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Maranda Engelbrecht is a food stylist and founder of the Babel restaurant at Babylonstoren outside Franschhoek. The menu is based on what is in season in Babylonstoren’s 4 hectare formal vegetable and fruit garden. We ask her if food culture, diet or money are more important?

They are all linked but for now it’s about food that money cannot buy.

Clean food is what we all aspire to.

Fresh from the garden and home cooking where time to enjoy is a luxury. Imperfection and honesty becomes the new perfection.

Andy Fenner is a guy who really really likes food and writes about it. He has written for numerous SA magazines but is best known for his blog, “Jamie Who?” Because food is something that affects us all, does that make us all eating designers?

Definitely not. You get people who approach food like a fuel. They just want to get it in their system and move on. If they could take a pill with the right amount of nutrients they would. I hate those people! An eating

designer is someone that realises the role design plays in the food world.

In a stagnant First World, has ethical eating become a form of political expression?

Yes, but you don’t want it to become a question of what’s right or wrong.

I can stand up and preach about why I have such strong beliefs on the provenance of food, but you would probably already know most of what I’d say. If you want to make a change, do it on your own account. And for the guys who have already made the change, don’t try and force it down other peoples’ throats; you might as well be the annoying Hare Krishna knocking on doors.

Anelde Greeff is the content director of both the Eat In and Eat Out magazines in SA. The ultimate Eat In reader, she loves shopping for food and discovering new markets, stores and products even more than she does cooking. We asked her if the purpose of eating design is only to manage weight and biological health concerns?

Eating design is not just about engineering the right diet to suit your

bodily needs and goals. It’s much like clothing and furniture design. You could ask the same question there, but phrased differently: Is the purpose of clothing design just to protect your body against the elements? Is the purpose of furniture design only to make sure you have a place to sit or lie down? Clearly not.

Perhaps it’s because I’m a bit of a hedonist, or perhaps it’s because I enjoy shopping and cooking, and the other processes associated with food, but to my mind, unlike clothing or furniture design, eating design is even less about the final product, and even more about the act associated with it.

Eating design is about tailoring the act of eating – the verb – and not just the food. It’s considering and planning the physical, emotional, environmental and psychological dimensions of this simple deed. It takes into account the way in which we experience eating in a particular moment, but also the experiences and memories that we connect with it. And if it is done successfully, it makes us remember gatherings and communities long after we’ve forgotten the actual food.

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Neil Jewell is the chef at the Bread & Wine Vineyard Restaurant on the Môreson Farm and acclaimed across SA for his charcuterie expertise. He believes in delicious, uncomplicated food.

What’s the biggest problem with the current food system?

I believe the problem with the current food system is that large industrial companies, who are buying out smaller producers, are slowly robbing us.

People are becoming more accustomed to mass-produced, flavour-enhanced products, which often rarely resemble the original starting point. Farms are closing down and factories are taking their places, but who really wants to take their kids to a food factory, to stroke a poor manipulated animal in a cage, destined to be a ready meal, in a freezer near you, for your convenience?

What is right with mass production?

It feeds the masses, employs many people and allows a select few to get very rich, but how often do those select few eat their own products?

David Cope is “The Foodie” of South Africa. He is also a writer and

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winemaker, and believes bacon is god.

We ask him if food culture, diet or money is more important?

I would say money drives food culture, which drives diet. The poorest part of the population has a food culture driven purely around value, which generally drives an undernourished (think Africa) or extremely overnourished (think USA) diet. The wealthy can afford to have food ideals, pursue moralistic food purchases and eat a perfectly balanced diet. Naturally there are exceptions to this, but I think the wealth divide is going to keep a healthy food culture out of the reach of many as long as it exists.

Justine Drake “gets paid to eat and drink, how bad can it be?” She is a South African chef, restaurant consultant, the editor of Fresh Living and the author of five cookbooks.

Why do we eat shrimps but not insects?

Culture entirely defines culinary standards and norms. Eating cows in the West is de rigueur but it would never be considered in India. Dogs and insects are commonplace in Asia

while most of the West would be horrified at the prospect. Why do so many see it as heinous and horrid to kill and eat a bunny rabbit yet parts of a dear little lamb find their way onto our plates weekly, and we don’t give it a moment's thought? Jonathan Safran Foer ponders these questions in his book Eating Animals (Penguin).

He suggests that dogs, if we let them breed without interference, would provide us with a sustainable, environmentally-friendly local meat supply. But could we consider sitting down to a plate of poached poodle with a side order of deep fried cockroach? No, for us genteel Westerners it will have to be a seared fois gras topped with a few pan-fried prawns – much less barbaric!

Why do we think we need added vitamins?

Because more and more we probably do. Ten years ago a healthy diet would have undoubtedly provided you with enough of your vitamin RDA to keep you in the peak of health. Nowadays the vast quantities of industrialised food – peeled, grated, fried at inferno temperatures, enhanced with preservatives – has had its lifeblood of goodness wrenched out of it. But

boy are they convenient? “Look these chickens are so much bigger and more tender”; and “Oh, I only shop at xxx, their vegetables last much longer.” Has it ever occurred to you that vegetables aren’t supposed to have a fridge life of three weeks?

And chicken is not supposed to be tumbled and pummelled, injected with brine and lord only knows what else? So by the time everything has been altered to suit our need for convenience and price, the chances are that the majority of vitamins have been lost too. What you think you saved on groceries you’re now going to have to spend on vitamins. Ain’t life a bitch?

Kate White is a copywriter, novelist and food fan. With Jono Cane, she is behind The Mess experimental eating design experience that popped up in Johannesburg when you blinked.

Can you design food culture? What would you include?

Exclude. I would definitely outlaw bad bread. We have an obesity problem here, which is basically a problem of poverty. If you think about this for more than one

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second it’s tragic. If someone is hungry and that loaf is their only loaf, then the bread companies should be legally obliged to create something nutritional, not injectedvitamin, starch-based, sweetened, salted, making-people-obese regurgitated cardboard. Bad bread pisses me off.

once headed up the defunct Jardine kitchen and is now at The Roundhouse.

Can food create world peace?

There is no such thing as world peace. It’s not even vaguely doable.

But, food can create family peace.

Even if it is only for an hour at the table. Even if you have a sulking teenager at the table, an exhausted mother, a dad who would rather be watching the talking box, or any other of those end-of-the-day feelings. The simple act of “Pass the salt please”, and the communal moment of eating exactly the same combination of stuff, will bind the people at the table. When you are choosing your new family – be it friends, lovers or partners – I think that having the same food norms is really important.

Can food create world peace?

There will never be world peace. Never has, never will.

Eric Bulpitt is a Cape Town chef and self-described “food whore”, who

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Because food is something that affects us all, does that make us all eating designers?

To a degree, we all design what we eat. Some are better designers than others though.

Does in vitro meat have a soul?

No, that’s like saying yoghurt has soul because its got living cultures. Only God can breathe soul into life.

Richard Bosman produces cured meats using traditional salting and drying techniques to create something special and unique. Based just outside Hermanus, the two most important ingredients in the process are the pork and time. We asked him how designers can feed the world?

Designers should not be feeding the world. Their role is to push the boundaries of man in order to bring about change. Humans are resistant

to change and designers need to go out of the traditional comfort zones to drag us into the future. Once the ideas become acceptable and fashionable, the designer’s job is done and they must move on to the next new thing.

Sumien Brink is the award-winning editorial director of design publication Visi and food magazine Taste. She cooks, bakes and gardens too.

How can emerging economies’ increasing desire for milk and meat be redesigned?

There could be tax reductions for families who own livestock that graze in communal parks. If a family is closely involved in their future dinners’ lives, maybe they would think twice about eating meat or milk from an animal they did not know.

when he cooked his way through Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals.

What’s right with mass production?

It makes a lot of money and food by producing it cheaply, but someone ultimately pays the cost of having "cheap" food, usually the end user, which is why we have so many preventative diet-related illnesses the world over.

Why do we think we need added vitamins?

Soil contains over 90+ minerals and trace elements, many of which are picked up by plants. When you strip your soil and pump only chemical-based NPK onto it or grow hydroponically, those elements and minerals are removed. Supplements are a great "band aid", but they don’t fix the cause, just the symptom.

What’s right with mass production?

It should be that more food equals more people getting food, but it’s not, so there’s nothing right with it.

Matt Allison is an urban farmer in Cape Town. His “I Am No Jamie Oliver” blog got going

Food fight You've got food in your face! Join the food fight and have your say. www.designindaba.com/food-fight

DI+Q4 2011 51

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Senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, Paola Antonelli thinks that food is a good medium to show what design is really about. Author of Food Politics, Marion Nestle is professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. Design Indaba sent them on a date.

Vermont where they had a garden and a wonderful cook. The cook would send the kids out to the garden to pick the food. Once you’ve eaten freshly picked vegetables, you can’t go back.

When it came time to go to university I wanted to study food but it wasn’t possible. You had two choices. You could study agriculture, but I’m a city girl. The other possibility was dietetics.

I went to university as a dietetics major and lasted exactly one day.

Paola: One day! I thought you were about to say one year. Why, what happened? aola Antonelli: For the past 10 years I have been working on a book project, which now might become an exhibition, about basic food units from all over the world, considered as examples of design. Since it was my own project and not for MoMA, I’ve been postponing and postponing, although I have done all the research.

Now I am proposing it to MoMA as a show, so that I’ll finally do it!

Marion: It’s the right time for it because everybody is doing food.

Paola: You’ve been doing food for a much longer time. How did you get to food as the focus of your work?

Marion: I’ve always loved to eat and I was introduced to real food at a summer camp when I was eight-years old. I was sent off to this camp in

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Marion: Well, I went to the first class and thought: “This is silly, I’m not going to do this.”

Paola: Good for you. It took me two years to leave economics.

Marion: Ah yes, economics. I regret not knowing agricultural economics, which would be helpful.

But so, I left it and did science. I did my doctorate in molecular biology. I ended up teaching cell and molecular biology, which was very abstract although very aesthetic. In my department at Brandeis in Massachusetts there was a rule that you could only teach the same class for three years. Then you had to stop and teach something else, whether you knew anything about it or not, because the idea was that you

would always be learning, changing, and keeping the teaching fresh. When it was my turn to do a new course, the students wanted a nutrition course and it was handed to me to teach. It was like falling in love; I never looked back.

In that first class I established the way that I would be thinking and teaching about food and nutrition ever since. It’s now been almost 40 years.

After that I went to the medical school in San Francisco (UCSF) where I taught nutrition to medical students for 10 years. In between I did a Master’s in public health nutrition that linked what I was doing to social questions. By the time I went to Washington to work on government policy for a couple of years, I knew basic nutrition, clinical nutrition and public health nutrition. After two years learning nutrition policy, I went to New York University.

Paola: I think there are few things in the world that can condense as much as food. You can approach it in so many different ways. It can be art. It can be literature. It can be policymaking Marion: It can be biology. I knew right from the first day that this was the best way to teach biology. When I was talking to students in my classes about cell and molecular biology, their eyes glazed over. It is very abstract. You can’t see it, smell it or touch it because these things are

very small; you need microscopes.

Food, on the other hand, is practical.

Everybody eats.

Paola: This is the same reason why I want to use food to explain to people that design is not just cute and expensive chairs. If you eat it, then you can understand it.

So, what do you think about the “molecular cuisine” term that is used so much?

Marion: [Laughs] Well, actually, when my partner and I went to elBulli…

Paola: You did?

Marion: Oh we did!

Paola: Was it a good experience?

Marion: It was a great aesthetic experience. The presentations were exquisite. Everything was served on these interesting, curved objects that you would never think of as plates. But the taste didn’t live up to it.

Paola: I’m not surprised but it is just funny that it all comes full circle and you get molecular cuisine.

Marion: It was very funny actually because it is very bad science. It is very trivial science. I went to a demonstration recently and they make a very big deal out of emulsions when these are not all

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Dunne & Raby www.designindaba.com/speaker/dunneraby “Foragers” by Dunne & Raby, shown as part of the Between Reality and the Impossible exhibition at the 2010 St Etienne Design Biennale. Based on the original “Designs for an Overpopulated Planet: Foragers 2009” concept developed for Design Indaba’s Protofarm 2050 project. Photos by Jason Evans.

that complicated. There is not very much science involved, but people love the idea.

Paola: When you say food, there are so many ways to think about it.

I always think in terms of scale and architecture; in the way the food units are design while the plates become more architectural. Then there is also the primal matter, discussed in books like Salt and Cod by Mark Kurlansky, for instance, which are so fascinating because they talk about food as a material. Cod could almost be considered concrete…

When did you start your activist take on food?

Marion: I’ve always been an activist so it was very easy to start teaching food and nutrition, see how the political system influenced what people ate and also make that connection for students. It didn’t come as a big discovery. In that first class in the mid-1970s I had students read a series of articles from the New York Review of Books about sugar subsidies and how the agricultural system supported politically powerful sugar growers.

Paola: So that was before the big corn controversy.

Marion: Yes, before corn. We were supporting a small number of USA farmers to grow sugar and sell it at

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a higher price. Here I am today teaching a course on the Farm Bill at NYU and talking about exactly the same problem with sugar and the opposite problem with corn.

Paola: Did it become legislation at all?

do sugar-free sodas, even though they don’t have calories, because it keeps the taste going.

Marion: I’ve never seen Farmville.

Marion: No, it was the first federal report that linked diet to the risk of heart disease, cancer and diabetes in 1988. It was a big research report, quite controversial and famous for telling everybody that they should eat less fat, which was very naïve.

Paola: You’ve never seen Farmville?

Paola: Why naïve?

Paola: No, I meant policy to re-educate.

Marion: No, because you have to log on and I don’t want to do all of that.

Marion: Well, it never occurred to the people working on the report that in taking the fat out of food, the food industry would replace it with sugar.

I don’t think anybody realised how fiercely the food industry was going to oppose any advice that people should eat less of their products.

Marion: Education of individuals isn’t enough. You need policies that make it harder to eat things that aren’t good for you and easier to eat things that are good for you. Unfortunately our economic system doesn’t promote that.

Paola: The Farm Bill and not Farmville…

Paola: Yeah, you have to log onto Facebook, which is also one of the reasons why I don’t do it, but it’s interesting. There’s policymaking and then there’s education, and education can do a lot for policymaking. One approach to education is gaming, but I don’t know if that is the case with Farmville.

Marion: I consider Farmville to be a gap in my education!

Paola: When you were in Washington, what kind of policies were you working on?

Marion: I was in the Department of Health and Human Services with a very fancy title – “Senior Nutrition Policy Advisor” – the same title that the chef in the White House, Sam Kass, now has! I produced and edited a 700page book on diet and chronic disease prevention while I was there.

Paola: What do you think of the attempts to regulate food right now? There are no more trans fats in restaurants in New York City. What do you think about the legislation that now wants to tax sodas?

Marion: It is an amusing idea, mostly because I think soda companies are completely out of control in how they are pushing products, especially on young people. Anything that sets them back a little is probably helpful. The first thing you do if you’re trying to lose weight is to stop drinking sodas.

Paola: Even sugar-free sodas?

Marion: You probably shouldn’t even

Paola: Ah, so you think there should be a re-education?

Marion: Oh no, I think it should be policy. Education doesn’t work.

Paola: Many designers today are working in a realm that is called “critical design”, especially at the Royal College of Art in London. There is one piece that we just acquired for the MoMA collection called “Foragers”, which was actually initiated by Design Indaba. It’s by Dunne & Raby, who are like the godparents of critical design.

In the project, because of the scarcity of food in the future, Dunne & Raby show us trying to go back to digesting things that we haven’t digested in centuries, like roots and algae. We do so by outsourcing our gastrointestinal system to different apparatus and machines.

These designers highlight critical issues with beautifully crafted scenarios that are filled with imagination, and that

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simply point in the direction of possible consequences. It is interesting to see how many people are working with the means at their disposal, which in some cases is data and research, and in other cases performances, trying to warn us about the food problem that is happening worldwide.

Do you do much research for the developing world or are you mostly focussed on the USA? Growing up in Italy, when I didn’t finish my food, my grandmother would say: “Think of the children in Biafra.”

Marion: For us it was the starving children in Europe!

Paola: [both laugh] But, do you have a take on the First World’s attitude towards the developing world when it comes to food?

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Marion: They make our food at a very low cost, or at least the raw materials. Chocolate is the best example. The Third World raises the plants and collects the pods, and then we turn it into very expensive chocolate and they don’t get much money for it. The same is true of coffee, bananas and sugar.

systems promote climate change or income disparities or whatever. You can do it through food and people are more likely to listen.

human behaviour being determined by social structures that does not guarantee an equitable and valuable food culture?

Paola: Do you see any examples of better education towards a more political approach to food in Europe for instance?

Paola: This is one of those questions that I get very angry about when journalists ask me, but do you think that there’s hope for any kind of balance developing from all these issues in the world?

Marion: Oh yes. The Scandinavian countries do all those things better.

They have such a different view of the role of food in society that of course children are fed in school, mothers receive support when they have babies, college and education are free...

It’s inconceivable for someone growing up in America to understand what that kind of social support is like.

Marion: Americans have a very different view of these things, which emphasises the personal and individual.

For us it’s about the promotion of rights and privileges in the decisions of the individual, with little critical understanding of how individual decisions are shaped by the society in which we live.

Marion: Only if people become more political. This is also another way in which using food is an easier way to teach people. It’s easier to understand the political economy of food than it is to understand how our economic

Paola: So it’s the free market theory, it’s the “Chicago School approach” of

Paola: The interests of the industry overwhelm this kind of individualism.

Marion: Yes, industry controls advertising, marketing and the way in which food is sold. What’s useful about food is that you can do experiments and actually demonstrate

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that, when it comes to food choices, free will isn’t enough.

The easiest example is what happens when you serve people large portions of food. When you do, people eat more. It’s that simple. Everybody eats more when given large portions.

Paola: Yes, its been proven.

Marion: And you can measure it, and explain that large portions make you eat more, but if you give people large portions, they still eat more. So it’s not education that determines food choice, it’s the environmental triggers. People can learn to recognise them and change their own behaviour but it’s very difficult.

Let’s get round to what you do? [laughs]

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Paola: I’ve been here at MoMA for almost 18 years. I’m an architect by training but, as I mentioned, I mistakenly did two years of economics. However, I do realise now that they are extremely precious for me and I still use them. My passion is contemporary design and architecture, far beyond furniture and products. I’ve done several shows at MoMA. A recent one was Design and the Elastic Mind, which was about designers and scientists working together. The one showing now is Talk To Me, which is about the communication between people and objects that happens even more explicitly now because of digital technology.

I came to food in a very similar way to you: Passion. I’m Italian, I used to be a really round big child. I lost

20kgs when I was 14 and then I went into all sorts of vagaries about my relationship with food, but I still love it. And when I came to New York, I realised that design is considered prettification and that it was difficult to talk about design in a way that was understandable to everybody.

I won’t lead you through it, but I decided to find any way possible to show people in the USA what design really is. That’s how I came to food as a way of doing this and I started working on my book that I spoke about earlier, which is called Design Bites.

stereotype – every shape is different because it has to accommodate a different sauce.

But the book gets more and more technical until it gets to high-tech foods, and eventually all those toxic kinds.

Marion: Oh good. Good title!

One day I’m going to make a list of designers for you that do food just to get your take.

Paola: I have so much research already. It’s based on the idea of really understanding how food is designed. Pasta is almost like a

It really came to me, for the same reason as yours about molecular biology, as a way to bypass too much intellectualism. You can be intellectual afterwards but the first interaction with food is so instinctual, that it can really drive the point home and get under your skin.

Marion: Yes I’d love that. That would be wonderful.

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Food urbanist Carolyn Steel argues that cities, like people, are what they eat. She explains to Delia de Villiers how, if food shapes our lives, it also shapes the cities in which we live.

f you’re reading this you are probably part of the third of the world’s population that can easily access food by simply walking into a shop or restaurant.

Most of us give little or no thought to the process that brings the food to where we want it, when we want

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it. Food has become disassociated from where it is produced, resulting in what architect and food urbanist Carolyn Steel calls the “paradox of urban life”.

“A very important part of the problem is that supply is no longer connected to demand and that, increasingly, we see chronic over-consumption and tons of food being wasted.”

Steel’s book The Hungry City outlines the contemporary urban food crisis, identifying how and why we landed up here, and what the real cost of our consumption habits are to the planet. Looking to possible solutions, Steel argues that we need to rethink and revalue food by implementing an infinite variety of more sustainable food systems.

For Steel, the problem starts with the fact that a city like London, for example, consumes 30 million meals every day. But the process whereby this is made possible is neither equitable, nor sustainable. And this is true for almost all cities across the world.

“We’ve completely lost touch with food and where it comes from,” says Steel. It’s this lack of involvement that has resulted in large-scale ignorance about the intensive process of producing food and transporting it to the urban centres where it is consumed.

The complexities of the contemporary urban food crisis can be traced back some 160 years, to the advent of trains.

Steel explains that for the larger part of human history people had settled close to their source of food. Communities and societies developed close to the harbours, markets and other locations where food was being produced. But then the Industrial Revolution brought

trains and more sophisticated forms of transport, and it became no longer necessary for people to live close to where food was grown.

The arrival of trains meant that for the first time in history, food was being disregarded in urban planning, simply because trains could bring the food into the city. So food and cities have evolved separately, says Steel, and the result has been a disaster.

The extent of the disaster is best understood when considering the figures. Annually some 19 million hectares of rainforest is lost to agriculture while another 20 million hectares of existing arable land is lost to salinisation and erosion. It takes 10 calories to produce every one calorie of food we consume. A billion people worldwide are obese while another billion are starving, yet

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half of all food produced in the USA is thrown away.

Adding further complexity to the problem is the fact that large, profitdriven, corporations essentially control every link in the food chain. More often than not these corporations are not paying enough attention to sustainable practices, partly because consumers aren’t demanding it of them. For years now we’ve paid very little attention to locality and seasonality because cheap oil meant that one could easily enjoy Spanish avocados in South Africa or Brazilian nuts in Dubai. But as we head closer to peak oil, the ever-increasing fuel price makes this practice wholly unsustainable, Steel elaborates.

Despite improved farming methods and more sophisticated technology, agriculture is no more sustainable today than it was in the 1900s. Steel

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speaks of the “slash and burn” farming methods that pay little heed to the loss of soil fertility and the depletion of aquifers.

The problem is simple enough, we must all eat. But, says Steel: “We need to start urgently looking at the potential of food to shape the world in a better, more equitable way.”

Therefore Steel proposes “sitopia”, from the Greek word “sitos” meaning food and “topos” meaning place. Sitopia is simply about recognising the allimportant role food has to play in our lives, and adopting it as central to a philosophy that drives a new social and urban vision.

While there is no silver bullet for this problem, for Steel the solution lies in the development of an infinite variety of systems. This starts with seeing

cities as organic entities that are heavily reliant on natural ecosystems.

“What if urban communities could devise a system that allows them to connect directly to the source of food?”

Steel asks. Where the stranglehold of the corporate system can be bypassed, or serve as nothing more than a silent regulatory body that overlooks a selfsupporting system.

Better-integrated urban planning systems also need to consider how the city is fed. “Food needs to consciously move to the core of planning systems,” Steel insists. Every aspect of planning needs to look to food as part of an integrated strategy. Steel is calling for a food map to be developed to help promote this shift from a fantasy about accessible and abundantly available food to the reality of the situation.

It’s encouraging to know that community-based food projects are happening in cities across the world. Steel says she regularly sees everything from urban vegetable gardens to community-led food trading projects. By becoming co-producers, Steel explains, the value of food can be highlighted and the inherited knowledge of a specific food type, territory or growing process can be protected and sustainably adapted.

While it’s true that we require “nothing short of a revolution in terms of food evolution” to realise a type of sitopia, there are systems, plans and ideas slowly being implemented across the world. This, Steel explains, needs to be scaled up to the point where our very understanding of what it means to live on Earth is influenced by food, in terms of daily habits, socio-economic structures, cultural understanding and value systems.

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Control freaks will be reluctant to hear Brian Wansink explaining how we think we’re a lot smarter than we are when it comes to food. Nadine Botha talks to the behavioural economist who thinks like a designer.

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hen you’re eating a meal, how do you know when to stop eating? Being full is actually the least likely reason that you stop eating, according to behavioural economist Brian Wansink. The most likely reasons to stop eating are when your plate is empty or when everyone else is done, says Wansink. However, another common time to stop is when the television show being watched is over!

Wansink has labelled this type of eating “mindless eating” and responded with a practical “behavioural design” approach. Through his Mindless Eating book he promotes a process of reverse engineering where his findings are flipped to make us mindlessly eat less and healthier. In other words, don’t eat while driving or watching TV, use smaller crockery and cutlery, and so forth. “The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on,” Wansink asserts.

Wansink has specialised in researching how people eat for over 10 years. As head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, he has executed over 500 experiments investigating the unconscious behaviours people exhibit while eating, mostly linking them to environmental influences.

Surely though, if we are aware of these factors, we can simply counter our mindless urges and eat mindfully?

Wansink disagrees, explaining that the over 200 choices we make daily about our food is just too much for our conscious brains to always be in control. “If somebody has the time and willpower, and no distractions to be mindful, then it’s a good approach to use because you actually enjoy food a lot more. The trouble is that if you don’t have a lot of time, you have a lot to do and you don’t have great willpower, which is what the majority of the population is like, then you have to come up with another context, another solution,” he goes on.

His results are striking: People tend to eat more if the food label says “lowfat” or if the food has a “health halo” (like salad). People tend to eat more if they are driving, watching television or eating straight from the packet. People tend to eat more if the plates, bowls, forks and spoons are larger, and also drink more if the glasses are shorter and fatter.

More significantly though is just pure denial, says Wansink: “After all the experiments I have done, the result that still surprises me the most is that people, when shown how these cues around them influence them, deny that they have any affect. People can sometimes believe that these cues influence other people, but they can’t believe that they influence themselves.

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“We don’t want to believe that we’re fooled by something as silly as the size of a bowl or the distance of the candy dish. We want to think that we’re smarter than that. We want to think that we’re informed, reasonable people. To all of a sudden have someone point out that you can’t even explain why you ate what you ate for breakfast, other than saying: “I like it”, throws a lot of people off.

People want to believe not necessarily that they are mindful eaters, but that they know what’s influencing them.

It’s the same with anything that points out a subtle influence on a person. If someone said that your child’s mood when you get up in the morning will influence what your mood is throughout the day, most people would deny it.”

The relevance of his findings to designers is palpable, but Wansink says that he would particularly like designers to read chapter six of his book in which he discusses the impact of packaging and presentation on what we eat: “The visual expectations of food tremendously biases consumer expectations of what it will taste like. Any bias like that can either push people into liking or disliking food, and should be used to help people enjoy healthier food with names and packaging that will make people expect it to taste great,” he explains.

Wansink has himself already been campaigning for healthier eating on a wider scale. He was appointed by President Barack Obama to lead

and engage the federal agency responsible for the 2010 Dietary Guidelines. The guidelines are known to have considerable institutional and corporate impact; before the 2005 Dietary Guidelines recommendation, whole grain was an exclusive product compared to its current ubiquity. Wansink’s appointment also represents a radical change of attitudes: “It’s the first time that they’ve acknowledged behaviour rather than just saying ‘eat that’ or ‘don’t eat that’”.

The Smarter Lunchroom project also entails Wansink putting his research into practice. Again, following hours of field research observing people’s behaviour and choices in school canteens and at restaurant buffets, Wansink simply suggests a couple of design tweaks to unwittingly influence people’s food choices. Spatial designers take note: People tend to make healthier choices if they pay with cash, the fruit and vegetables are earlier in the queue and there is more variety, if the person in front of them does, if the salad bar is right at the checkout till… And more.

Of course, one has to ask the obvious question that he’s probably been asked in every interview: Does Wansink himself eat mindlessly or mindfully?

The diplomat replies: “The one thing I’ve realised is that every decision you make about food, for most of us, can’t be a mindful or brilliant decision.

What I’ve been able to do is set up my environment so that I do it much less than I otherwise would.”

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Sculpture in elBulli dining room. Photo by Maribel RuĂ­z de Erenchun.

Although the elBulli restaurant has closed, Ferran AdriĂ is only just getting started. He talks to us about the future, broadening his audience, creativity, mistakes and food obsession.

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erran Adrià has sweated at the coalface of avant garde cooking for the better part of his 49 years. Ranked the best restaurant in the world from 2006 to 2009, elBulli was known for annually receiving 1 million table requests for the 8 000 tables it could accommodate in its six-month season.

However, just a few months ago, at the end of July, the famous restaurant closed its doors.

The food world has lamented the prospect of not being able to experience elBulli again. Chefs the world over responded by preparing tribute dinners based on elBulli menus to

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Left: Santiago cake, featured as a dessert to a meal of Caesar salad, cheeseburger and potato crisps in Adrià’s The Family Meal.

Right: The elBulli staff dinner or “family meal” on which the recipes in Adrià’s The Family Meal book is based. Photos by Francesc Guillamet. Courtesy of Phaidon, www.phaidon.com.

recognise the man who has defined contemporary gastronomy.

work can access it quickly and accurately. New technologies will have great importance.

However, Adrià is far from retired.

After taking a holiday in August, in September he led the world’s leading chefs in signing the “Declaración de Lima”. In October he published his first book pitched at home cooking, The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adrià with Phaidon. Based on how the elBulli staff would feed themselves, it is significant of Adrià seeking more than simply three Michelin stars.

What happens now after elBulli has closed? elBulli is not closed, it is being transformed into the elBulli Foundation. This transformation is not something new when you look at the history of the restaurant. It has constantly undergone change, but never with as much impact as now.

At the foundation, which one could describe as an evolution of the elBulli workshop, we will focus on creativity, which is our passion.

We will try to transmit creativity constantly and comfortably so that all those interested in our

Is the era of gastronomy over, as some people are saying?

There are dedicated professionals in the world who are proving every day that the kitchen is a constantly evolving discipline. Our work at the foundation will also, as always, continue to contribute to the progress of gastronomy.

What is more important when it comes to food – preparation, culture, diet or nutrition?

All the factors you mention are important because they are interrelated. If one of these points fails, the overall outcome is negative.

This shows that cooking is a discipline where many factors converge and coexist, relevant to our society, welfare and health.

You are interested in the person having eating the experience. How would you make your ideas more accessible to the public, promoting creative food to a broader audience?

We are aware of the limitations we

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have at a restaurant like elBulli, as both the production and staging in a restaurant of this type is impossible to play out for a large amount of people. For many years this has been a huge problem and frustration for us because we cannot meet all the requests for tables.

Still, we believe that by working through the elBulli Foundation, more people from the world of catering and gastronomy (among others), will be able to come into contact with and experience our work, in the end leading to more consumers having similar dining experiences all over the planet.

In addition, for years the foundation has worked with Alicia (www.alicia. cat) on improving the quality of food in other areas of public dining, such as hospitals, soup kitchens, schools and nursing homes.

Ferran Adria www.designindaba.com/speaker/ferran-adria

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Do you think you could improve the quality of life of average people with creativity and food?

There is evidence that leading a healthy and balanced diet is critical to health and disease prevention.

In addition, when a person enjoys a dining experience, they are

happy and happiness, no doubt, improves our lives.

is to our health, food is actually quite a trivial factor.

What are some mistakes you have made over the past years that other people can learn from?

Like everyone, I have made many mistakes. Out of all of them however, what has generated the most controversy is that we have not always explained our work well. We have learned this lesson, which is why we are placing so much importance on disseminating and explaining our work at the elBulli Foundation.

Still, we should not obsess, and we should understand the difference between daily meals and the food that makes an experience out of dining in a restaurant.

What are the things you would still like to discover or develop?

Lots of things! However, if I had to choose one, it would be solving one of our greatest challenges: Hot ice cream.

Why has the world so suddenly become obsessed with food and eating, and is this a healthy obsession?

I actually don’t think that’s true. If we count the time we spend shopping for, preparing and eating food in our daily lives, we actually only spend about 20% of our time on food. If we consider how important a healthy diet

There is another factor (I think the most important) related to food. The biggest, most urgent challenge today is to mitigate the lack of food. People around the world must stop wasting food in everyday life. This is worth everyone obsessing over.

What can other types of design learn from chefs like you?

The synergies between different creative disciplines are very positive, interesting and enriching. I have learned much from other fields. More and more professionals from other sectors have also become interested in the way we work, using it as inspiration for methodologies they can apply to different scopes. For example, this year I taught a course at Harvard University (with whom I have collaborated for several years) on creativity. The attendees came from many diverse disciplines.

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Left: Bread and garlic soup, featured as a starter to a meal of Mexican-style slow-cooked pork, and figs with cream and kirsch, in Adrià ’s The Family Meal.

Courtesy of Phaidon, www.phaidon.com.

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Right: Rib to hare royale from elBulli menu. Photos

by Francesc Guillamet.

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Yum Yum peanut butter, Ouma rusks, Supreme cakeflour, Nola sunflower oil and Mague Number One maize drink are all iconic stalwarts of the South African kitchen.

Photographer Jonx Pillemer and food-jammer Jade de Waal spent an afternoon playing with their food in Foodcorp’s Seventh Floor Innovation Centre

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PROMOTION

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PROMOTION

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Credits: Photographer: Jonx Pillemer (SJ Artists) Stylist: Jade de Waal Project manager: Shani Judes (SJ Artists)

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Special thanks: Foodcorp Innovation Centre www.foodcorp.co.za

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PROMOTION

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John Cage picking mushrooms in the woods.

Photo from the William Gedney Collection, Duke University David M Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The notion of picking one’s own food, especially in urban areas, can seem absurd. Elizabeth Thacker Jones follows “The Wildman” Steve Brill around New York and discovers that John Cage was the original urban forager.

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related topics and a recently released smartphone and tablet application called “Wild Edibles”(see page 126), The Wildman is still innovative.

A pair of squirrels chase each other up a giant oak tree. Canada geese quack in the distance. It’s raining but, not discouraged, Brill marches through Prospect Park down a narrow path towards a fence. We follow. He steps over the fence with ease and those of us with appropriate footwear join him.

“Jackpot,” he says, without cracking a smile. t one o’clock on a rainy spring day, Steve Brill is meeting a group of strangers in Grand Army Plaza, the entrance to Prospect Park in the Park Slope neighbourhood of Brooklyn. Brill is devoted to higher education about nature, leading tours in community parks and preserved areas in New York City and further afield in the surrounding counties. More specifically, his focus is on edible plants and he encourages tour goers to experience the journey by tasting.

Also known as “The Wildman”, a foraging trip with Brill consists of four basic elements: The plants, the jokes, the journey and the iPad. A fifth might be the bags he recommends you bring to take home any found treasures.

Surprisingly, it is the iPad that really enhances the experience of nature, local food and community by offering quick appreciation of edible and medicinal wild plants and mushrooms.

Having published several books on

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Together we pick giant oyster mushrooms that have grown up behind a large fallen tree. The sun struggles to peak down through the canopy of foliage and a monarch butterfly appears, drowning out complicated pleadings for the rain to cease.

“I’ll tell you the story of when I was arrested,” says Brill.

“My big break came at 4pm, 29 March 1986, when two undercover park rangers who had infiltrated a Central Park tour arrested and handcuffed me for eating a dandelion. The police fingerprinted me and charged me with criminal mischief for removing vegetation from the park, but I had eaten all the evidence. So they released me with a desk-appearance ticket pending trial.”

Laughter and awe from the group.

I clutched the mushrooms and felt

unreasonably pleased with myself. I wondered if John Cage ever had to thwart the cops.

While Brill may be the most wellknown contemporary American foraging for wild foods today, he’s preceded by many before him, including Cage – musician, artist and one of the founders of the New York Mycological Society. Considered the father of experimental music, his interest in foraging is less known.

Perhaps Cage did not want to bring attention to something that for him was a meditative experience?

These original artists and environmentalists of the 1970s left behind an awareness and appreciation of biodiversity that is now taking a new form in urban areas. The concept of a local “foodshed”, has entered our lexicon – speaking to where exactly our food is grown or processed.

Foraging today also connects deeply to an extreme “locavore attitude”.

We are beginning to question whether or not the flattening of our world really benefits the environment, public health and hunger issues.

Alternatives like seasonal, locally produced foods and the knowledge to make the right choices are directly linked to a “Food Movement”.

While Cage’s metaphysical exploration of foraging connects to his artistic endeavours, as a child in Carmel, California, during the Great Depression, his foraging was for sustenance. And, Cage supplied mushrooms to New

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Left page and top right: Cantharellus Tubaeformis or fall chanterelle is a delicious edible typically found in the fall. Bottom right: Young hunter, Leander Johnson poses with mushroom specimens in front of the old farmhouse at Mildred's Lane. Mildred's Lane is an artist-run community and school in the deep woods of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Photos by Athena Kokoronis.

York City’s iconic Four Seasons, a white tablecloth restaurant, turning his act into a business pursuit. It is no wonder Cage was guarded about his foraging: He cites Henry David Thoreau as the inspiration for his pursuits but, a celebrated pioneer among environmentalists today, Thoreau spoke out against environmental exploitation for profit.

The conversation between the personal, the artistic and the business of food also deserves further exploration. The current generation of chefs is growing their own food, foraging and partnering with small purveyors and artisans. Restaurant menus are beginning to highlight their ever-changing food sources. A discussion with a chef about taste can lead to talk of rejecting massproduced feedlot poultry and lauding films like Food Inc. Meanwhile, a “food is fashion” mentality has inspired cookbooks bursting with images and recipes whose ingredients may not even be accessible to most readers.

At a recent visit to a Dutch-inspired restaurant called Vandaag in NYC’s East Village, the “foraged ginger” on the menu caught my attention. “The chef goes upstate once a week,” the server told me. I wondered if he had taken Brill’s foraging tour? Or was inspired by the current interest in Nordic cuisine that has been lauded for its location-inspired menu?

The notion of picking one’s own food, especially in urban areas, can seem absurd. Questions about foraging may seem rooted in epistemology – how did our current food system come to be? This interest in foraging may be a beautiful and artistic manifestation of some very important questions. And by looking to the past, can we provide answers for the future?

Ironically, after Brill was arrested, he was hired by the New York City Department of Parks. The knowledge he shares speaks to the passions of Cage and Thoreau. If not for Brill, it could be lost.

Based in Brooklyn, New York, Elizabeth Thacker Jones curates and produces food culture happenings that address global food system issues. Website: www.elizabeththackerjones. com. Twitter: @elizabethtjones

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Previous spread: Winter cabbage and winter oysters.

This spread: Pork neck with bulrushes, violets and malt.

From Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine.

Photos by Ditte Isager. Courtesy of Phaidon Press, www.phaidon.com

René Redzepi of Noma Restaurant in Denmark has charmed himself into every foodie’s imagination with his whole-systems approach to food.

Marije Vogelzang chats to him about MAD Foodcamp, creativity, intuition, fingers, social media and being part of the future.

René: To set a completely new challenge was very necessary for me. It’s a technique that I use a lot for things. Sometimes I do it in simple ways at the restaurant too.

But a festival and symposium is something I have never been part of. I had to think not so much as a restaurant chef but a food person, somebody that knows about food.

Did you have a chance to go to the symposium?

arije Vogelzang: I’m sure you must be extremely busy?

René Redzepi: I am. I never expected that the more success you have the more work you get, but I’ve discovered that it’s actually true. On the other hand, I also give myself a lot of work, for instance the MAD Foodcamp and Symposium.

Marije: I think it was a wonderful event.

I really liked the roughness of it.

René: That was the whole point; it had to feel completely transparent. I wanted no pretentiousness, everything had to be focussed on the people, and be about the food, animals and ingredients. We spent all our energy and money on getting that organised.

Marije: It felt to me like such a natural extension of your ideology and I wonder if you would feel more comfortable working outside the setting of a restaurant?

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Marije: I didn’t catch it all because I was doing the Veggie Bling Bling Workshop but I have seen some things on the internet.

René: Ok good, because it was a mega success. I’ve attended tons of these things around the world, some very academic, some very focussed on the latest creations and blah blah. But the whole spirit of this was that chefs should learn new knowledge and take part in the world around them. I was so surprised how well the chefs took it. They started to understand that the more they know about the history of food, the culture that’s behind it and the latest new science, the better they will cook.

Marije: I think it is the beginning of a new era where everybody is relating to food. Even designers who never worked with food before have started thinking about and working with food because it connects to everything. It connects everybody and connects the whole system.

René: It’s true. One chef sitting there was saying: “Wow, so this means that if I change the way that I source my ingredients then I can actually help people get food in another part of the world?”

It still surprises me, but the combination of all of us doing it can create a big change and that is just amazing.

I think people want this new knowledge. We go to school and learn a lot of things but we don’t learn about the implications of various types of agriculture. Some chefs argue that what we cook for is just flavour and the rest doesn’t matter, like it doesn’t matter how the food is made. But it is more than that.

Marije: So are you going to continue with this?

René: Let’s see. It’s all about money, of course. To tell the truth, we don’t want any large-scale food sponsors like food production companies. Our dream and intention is that we do it every year, and that every year we come closer and closer to this big outdoor festival where people eat and sleep, and where in the evening you can have open air movies, like relevant documentaries and shows about food.

Marije: Can you imagine incorporating a larger crossover of designers or creative thinkers, together with chefs and food people?

René: Most definitely. Every year will have a different topic. One year a theme could be something like that.

Design and food go hand in hand.

It’s important because you need a way to sell your ingredient, product, readymade sauce or whatever.

But also, many of the high-profile chefs are inspired by design and architecture. The way that food is being looked at now is not that different from, let’s say, the general way of looking at design. You know: Straight to the point, unpretentious, very practical, and a focus on quality and clarity of materials. In many ways, that is starting to happen in food as well.

Marije: When I hear you talk about MAD Foodcamp and your excitement about its amazing connection between nature, society, education, flavour and ingredients, I wonder if you don’t feel restricted working within the setting of the restaurant? I ask this because I had a restaurant that I sold last week, because I felt really restricted by the repetitiveness of trying to have the same quality over and over again.

René: I think all restaurants and all chefs have that issue. You have this moment where everything is right, all your thoughts are new, and they create new pillars for your way of cooking and organising a team. When you have success through that you start stressing more and being less

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creative. I think your brain starts to become hollow because you start focussing on success. So, how do you keep yourself inspired, how do you not switch to autopilot?

Marije: Yeah, do you still feel light?

René: I know at one point that I am going to run into this. Then it will be time for me to leave the restaurant and pass on the work to somebody who can see things with a new light and a breath of fresh air. Maybe that will never happen. Maybe I will find some way to reboot constantly. As for right now, I am still filled with inspiration, I must say.

Marije: I can imagine you can still find a way that brings the restaurant guests into nature.

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René: Maybe the future lies in that somewhere. But right now the restaurant theme still lies in developing the flavour. I don’t know what that sum is of all the people we are, all the ingredients we have, the culture, the history, the religion… What is the sum of all these things together on a plate?

I’m still exploring that in strange and weird ways. I’m not finished; I still have a lot of energy and feel like a child searching.

Marije: It’s nice to hear that you still feel like a child and can still feel light, because I think you’re some kind of poet.

René: [laughs] I think it is important, otherwise it doesn’t make any sense to work as much as I do. I would never work as much as I do just to generate

profit. It’s because it is about shaping a point of view that matters, which is very gratifying. And then I just love the fact that you’re learning constantly.

That has to be my life ambition, to keep learning and teaching.

plants and the wild foods that we use are medicinal.

Marije: Have you ever thought about medicinal food? Do you think about the affect that the food has on your guests?

René: It’s true, even though you had about 20 dishes. I do think about things like being a human being and what our bodies process. What lives well in the stomach? What is the flavour and where are all the diverse mouth feelings? How do you end off a meal with a stomach that is balanced?

So that your mind, taste buds and intellect have been challenged? So that you’re satisfied and that you’ve learnt new things, but that your stomach is also balanced? I think about that in a subconscious way. As a person that deals with food and works with taste

René: This is not something intentional, but a lot of people mention that their body feels great and that when they wake up in the morning, their body doesn’t have this heavy feeling. But I wouldn’t put in a specific seed just because I know that it is good for cancer or something like that, even though I’ve studied a lot of those things as a lot of the

Marije: I did notice that at the end of the dinner, even though I’d eaten so much, I really felt very light still.

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Left: Vegetable field.

Right: Scallops with sea urchins, sea buckthorn and miukko.

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From Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine.

Photos by Ditte Isager. Courtesy of Phaidon Press, www.phaidon.com

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all the time, you just do whatever feels right. You know what I mean?

Marije: Yes, it is something that you do intuitively.

You know, I was so happy to eat with my hands because suddenly you already taste the food before putting it in your mouth, by tasting it with your fingertips. Do you want to push this more in the future? Could you imagine going beyond the plate or beyond the table?

René: Absolutely. I’ve found people actually quite enjoy it. Most of them are, unlike you, provoked by it. They think they’ve paid all this money and are then asked to eat with their fingers, but then they do it and realise it comes so naturally. It awakens something in them. Of course there are those other people who just think it’s funny and completely takes the pretence out of dining. Somehow though, it breaks down all barriers once you’ve seen the person in front of you put their fingers in their mouth.

It’s like when you go to Finland.

You land at the airport and two hours later you’re in the sauna with a bunch of naked men. Then two hours later you’re in a meeting room with these men, but you see them differently because you’ve just seen them naked. It’s the same when you see businessmen in front of each other eating with their fingers, looking awkward and nervous.

It’s fabulous. It creates a looser, lighter mood.

Marije: Yeah, it’s really great to see people’s responses. I’m working at the moment on a project in Budapest where I’m going to have gypsy women feed you with their hands.

I’m really scared because it’s quite a thing whether you want to be fed by someone that you do not know. I’m making an installation where you can’t have eye contact with each other and I think that will make it better.

René: Wow! Just the fact that I’m being fed by someone that I don’t know, that’s really crossing some boundaries. I mean, have they washed their fingers, what do they have on them? Also, it’s in Budapest and putting an extra stamp on that it’s a gypsy! In many societies that is the lowest you can get in terms of mankind… That’s crazy.

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Marije: They will wash their hands in front of you. But it is very much on the edge, I agree. The women will tell you their life stories using food as a way to create understanding.

But I was wondering if you had to design an object that was non-edible, would you approach it in the same way you approach food?

René: We do design serving objects constantly. We have done this type of plate for serving oysters. We take a lot of rocks from where the oysters are found and create a setting for the oyster. In that sense, it is not a dish, but an object. These are the kinds of objects we do. Also like the pieces of wood with the flowers in the vase and the felt plates that you experienced.

Marije: I liked those. Do you think that social media is something that will change the future of chefs or food?

René: For us it’s like a newsletter.

Instead of writing long newsletters once a month, it’s a constantly updated feed of what’s happening.

Marije: I was just thinking that for farmers, social media could help them connect with each other and the public.

René: It would be amazing because a lot of these farmers have no idea how to sell their products.

Marije: Do you think that there’s a way to incorporate normal people, beyond the chefs?

René: It could be for normal people as well. But the best thing for that is small farmer markets, in many areas of each city. It brings such a special soul and life.

Marije: Do you think that regular, non-foodie people go to markets?

There are a lot of people that don’t take time for food and just buy fast things at supermarkets. Is there a way to get these people to go to real markets again?

René: The problem is that there are very few real markets. If there were more markets it would be easier to get people to buy and cook better food. People would be able to talk about the ingredients, why perhaps they are more expensive, what the benefits are of that specific ingredient and also about how to cook it.

That’s a big thing. When you’re at the supermarket and stare at a piece of red cabbage, you wonder what you are going to do with it? I don’t have time to go home and look through 15 cookbooks. Then you ask the guy who is in charge of the green crops and he says he doesn’t know, he eats pizza every night.

Marije: [laughs] Yeah.

Marije: There are also these apps with maps of cities where people show where you can find free food in the city or in the wild.

René: There are apps that do that?

René: People that grow food also cook food. They know how to cook it.

Because they cook what they grow, there is a whole different interaction that is better.

Marije: Yeah. Maybe you can start one for Denmark.

Marije: Do you think you will be an active part of that future?

René: Another idea I have is for a company where people create contact with chefs for the farmers and contacts with farmers for the chefs. Or be the middleman: Going to chefs and asking what they want, what they are missing and then finding it for them, and visa versa.

René: Well I always thought that I wouldn’t have the time and so on. But if I think about it from my chef perspective, then I hope my sous chefs, and all the people that are eating right now in my restaurant, go out to open their own restaurants and spread the message of good food. They’re like family.

Marije: It could be a website too.

René: Yeah, where farmers would log on and say they have carrots coming into season, and chefs would see what they could get and start a conversation.

Marije: I think with the position that you have right now, you will radiate that to the rest of the world and inspire people. So you will have an influence on it whether you want it or not.

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Blueberries surrounded by their natural environment.

From Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. Photos by Ditte Isager. Courtesy of Phaidon Press, www.phaidon.com

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happy calor es There are two neurobiological mechanisms that make us eat, one driven by need and the other by desire.

Based in the brain’s hypothalamus, the need to eat is sparked by metabolic messages from the digestive system.

The desire to eat, however, is controlled by higher brain centres such as the dopamine reward system.

When food with high calorie counts is taken in, the nucleus accumbens part of the brain is flooded with dopamine, thus increasing the eater’s pleasure.

Often the dopamine reward system overrides the hypothalamus, which is why we carry on eating tasty food even when we’re not hungry.

Illustration by Katrin Coetzer.

Website: www.katrin.co.za

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clothes made of milk German fashion designer Anke Domaske has developed a revolutionary material made from high concentrations of the milk protein casein. The material looks and feels like silk but can be washed normally and also promises health benefits - the amino acids are antibacterial, anti-ageing, and can help regulate blood circulation as well as body temperature. It takes about 6 litres of milk to make an entire dress.

Photo by Jannes Frubel.

surplus food truck Ever wondered what happens to the food in the supermarket once it reaches its sell-by date? Artist and food blogger Debra Solomon had the same enquiry so she found a way to put this food, which would otherwise be wasted, to good use.

The Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking project is a mobile truck that collects food products that have reached their sell-by date from supermarkets and vegetable markets.

Working with food entrepreneurs, cooking studios and hotel school students, Solomon then develops a recipe for a signature snack using these food sources that are already in the neighbourhood.

Not only is the Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking project a way to reduce food waste, it is also a way to promote the micro-economies around local food and engage the community in issues around food.

The project was started in Rotterdam’s Afrikaanderbuurt in the Netherlands and has been replicated in other locations around the world.

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produced from food Baked by Formafantasma is a collection of containers and vessels made from a material based on ingredients found in the kitchen such as flour, coffee, cocoa and spinach, mixed together with other natural products such as salt, shellac and spices to make the objects durable.

It is inspired by a Sicilian folk event in Salemi, where a flour-based material is used to create architectural decorations. The project is a homage to bread and flour – primordial and essential materials that accompany our daily life – and to the craftsmanship of baking and cooking.

compost truck The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences is an ever-growing, worldwide network of people devoted to forwarding the interest of awesomeness in the universe.

The Foundation distributes a series of monthly (or so) US$1 000 grants to projects and their creators. The recently launched Awesome Food chapter of the foundation made its first micro-grant to Compost Mobile, a Miami-based service that collects and transforms residential food scraps into compost for community gardens.

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food deskjet The Fab@Home project at Cornell University has been working on a 3D food printer whereby food is “printed� using a syringe. The movements of the syringe are determined by computer blueprints and models, while the material is layered to ultimately create the 3D object. So far they have printed chocolates, biscuits and domes of turkey meat. The models have all thus far used only one syringe, but the team is experimenting with using multiple syringes to allow for the combination of different ingredients.

Photo by Jeff Lipton.

sounds for eating Turntable Kitchen mails their "Pairings Box" of hand-assembled food and music goodies to their subscribers once a month. Each box contains a limited-edition vinyl, a digital mixtape, seasonally themed recipes, dried ingredients for the recipes, and a collection of suggested pairings, tasting notes and additional insights into the music and food.

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conviviality collective Arabeschi di Latte is a group of Italian women designers with a passion for conviviality, founded by Francesca Sarti in 2001. The group's mission is to experiment with new design concepts that relate to food, and its fascinating power to create situations and relationships.

Mediterranean hospitality is a key factor in this work and is enlivened by Italian culture. Food is seen as a tool that leads to opportunities for getting together to share a simple meal. “Food is an everyday necessity, but at the same time it has a lot of things to say, a lot of stories to tell about the people behind the products,” Sarti told LS:N Global. “It’s a big word.”

In the past 10 years, Arabeschi di Latte has created and exhibited a variety of eating events, special dinners, pop-up cafes, workshops, branding, product design, performance and exhibition design throughout Europe. Projects have included such eccentricities as insisting people feed each other with giant spoons, creating bespoke tea ceremonies, hanging knapsacks from

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trees, opening a bitter – as opposed to sweet – shop, erupting a giant polenta volcano with melted cheese, getting art gallery patrons to make their own gnocchi, and a wholly biodegradable compost dinner.

A lot of their work is also simple, celebrating the humble joys of everyday experiences with a smack of nostalgia for times past. During their "Sunday Passions", for instance, Arabeschi di Latte entertains guests in an extensive kitchen space, and celebrates the passion and basic aesthetics of nostalgic hobbies. Guests can savour several varieties of bread, freshly made pasta and preserves in a nod to activities such as homemade preserving, crochet and needlework, vegetable growing, and homemade pasta and bread making.

“We are part of a generation that still had certain rituals in childhood and slowly lost them, growing up,” describes Sarti. “Reviving these rituals is one of our most important themes.

It’s not an invention; it’s very basic.

It’s about recovering good habits from the past.”

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meat you in vitro At the end of August this year, New Scientist predicted meat without slaughter within six months time.

Designers like James King have long been asking what we might choose to give shape, texture and flavour to this new sort of food in order to better remind us where it came from.

In his project “Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow”, King proposes that the most aesthetically pleasing crosssectional images of animal organs be used to create moulds for the in vitro meat.

sewn up sausages Using traditional sewing techniques, Aufschnitt boutique has created a range of hand-stitched craft that emulates everyday sausages and meat products. The functional product range includes meat and ham cushions ranging from small to beanbag size.

There is also the sausage-in-glass gift idea, a chain of sausages as a scarf and a ring-shaped ham neck roll. The designer of the label, Silvia Wald, is a vegetarian. “Aufschnitt” is German for cold cuts.

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to eat or not to meat Jaap Korteweg’s vegetarian butchery in Den Haag is the first of its kind in The Netherlands. An eighth generation lupin farmer, Korteweg hopes to reinvigorate market interest in the protein-rich crop. The butchery was co-founded with chef Marco Westmaas and animal rights politician Niko Koffeman. It sells its own range of meat substitutes, as well as existing products.

seeing the meat for the peas The Doppelganger Dinner was inspired by the notion that an omnivore and a vegetarian couple could never share the same meal without a compromise. What followed was a six-course meal times two: One version made for an omnivore and the second for a vegetarian.

So, the omnivore might be served roasted beef bone marrow, mustard greens and duck-fat toast, while the vegetarian version would be yukon gold potato bone with onion marrow, kale salad, and miso butter toast.

Salmon roe was swapped out for apricot roe, beef tartar for tomato tartar, duck for watermelon and scallop for tofu.

Executed by the San Francisco culinary collective Studiofeast, headed up by Mike Lee, the group had no intention of making it easy for themselves. The omnivore and vegetarian versions had to look identical without repeating

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any of the ingredients (besides the basics like oil and salt), and no vegetarian meat substitutes such as tofurky were allowed.

“This turned out to be an interesting puzzle because we had to compose our dishes in pairs. Ingredients that could never be coaxed into resembling some other ingredient were out of the question. On top of that, we needed pairs of ingredients that looked visually alike to each other, but also paired nicely with the flavour profile of the rest of their dishes,” explains Lee. Reportedly inspiring a lot of crossdish tasting and questions of “what am I eating?” the meal encouraged interaction and sociability. “Confusion was indeed a by-product of this meal and I hope it kept everyone on their toes throughout the meal,” laughed Lee. Photos by Steph Goralnick, http://sgoralnick.com

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the meal of all meals “Every prisoner waiting to be executed is granted a last meal. Prisoners waiting to die choose their last meal for different reasons. Some choose from past memories, while others feast on what they crave at the moment.

Such fascinating details surrounding the final hours before being put to death are a matter of public record and are the inspiration for this series of photographs,� writes photographer Jonathon Kambouris about his ongoing project collating the last meals of people sentenced to the death penalty.

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the ingredients of good writing Wendy Macnaughton is an illustrator with a penchant for good art, good food and good work. She has spent most of her life in transit, living in Los Angeles, New York, Amsterdam, Paris

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and East Africa before moving back to her hometown of San Francisco. She’s written advertising copy, designed humanitarian campaigns in Kenya and Rwanda, produced a film in the

Democratic Republic of Congo, sold used books, counselled survivors of torture, and served as a social worker and non-profit advertising campaign director. She created and illustrated

the national campaign for the first democratic elections in Rwanda. She creates artwork for Juxtapoz, GOOD, TimeOut NY, 7x7 Magazine, Longshot and Gizmodo.

chillies ward off elephants

In rural parts of Africa, where humans and elephants battle for access to the same land, chillies are working to distract the animals from causing carnage while serving as a cash crop for farmers.

Like thieves in the night, elephants in rural parts of Africa raid the crops of subsistence farmers located close to their habitat. Their nightly expeditions wreak havoc and threaten the livelihood of farmers and those dependent on the farmer’s yield. As this scene plays out in large parts of southern and eastern Africa each night, parties on either side of this food battle are losing ground, literally.

In raiding the crops, the elephants destroy plantations, damage homes or, in extreme cases, injure or kill people. The farmers, in turn, have to spend nights guarding their crops, a dangerous activity that leads to a loss in productivity. For the elephants, their habitat is continuously compressed as agriculture expands, forcing them onto the cultivated land.

For decades rural farmers have employed traditional methods for keeping the elephants at bay, including beating drums and burning fires.

While these methods are less capital intensive and more environmentally friendly than chemical repellents, electric fencing and disturbance shooting, the effectiveness of these methods wane as elephants habituate to them. Central to effective elephant diversion strategies is the need for it to be easy to implement and managed by the farming community themselves.

Enter the Elephant Pepper Development Trust (EPDT), an elephant conservation project

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dedicated to managing the conflict between humans and elephants while striving to promote the livelihood of the farmers. The EPDT have found that planting chillies is the most effective and sustainable elephant diversion strategy currently known. Elephants are unable to tolerate the spicy herb.

They won’t eat it and find its strong scent discomforting, thus steering clear of it.

More than simply using the chilies as an elephant scare tactic, the EPDT encourage farmers to grow chillies to sell to African Spices, a for-profit facilitator who sells the chillies on the domestic and international market.

The chillies are also sold to Elephant Pepper, an organisation who works in collaboration with EPDT, where the dried herb is used as the key ingredient in their range of African spices and sauces.

In the interest of wildlife conservation and sustainable economic development, 10% of the profit from the sale of Elephant Pepper products gets reinvested in the EPDT to further its conservation work. With support from environmental and conservation agencies, the EPDT trains farmers to grow their own chillies and guides them in teaching other members in their communities to do the same.

fabric greens

Elephant Pepper Development Trust’s chilli solution is a welcome alternative to injuring or killing the animals while creating a feasible economic model that the affected farmers can benefit from.

The “Vegetables” range of Scholten & Baijings is handcrafted out of fabric by the designers themselves. The project was a way for them to explore the actual production side of design, as opposed to handing it over to a craftsman. They dyed the fabrics, modelled the forms, and made the structures and skins by hand. Although the vegetables have no practical function, the Dutch design duo hope they will evoke a feeling of unexpected pleasure, even start a conversation.

Photo by Frédéric Salein.

Photos by Yves Krol.

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veggie toner Graphic designer John Jansen created a range of organic inks for his graduation project at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. Suitable for silk-screening, Jansen restricted himself to using vegetables and fruit that have their own juice – when cut, it had to “bleed” the juice. The variety of colours was created using spinach, beetroot, red cabbage, carrot, seabuckthorn and blueberry.

mutated produce The Mutato-Archive by Uli Westphal is a collection of nonstandard fruits, roots and vegetables, displaying a dazzling variety of forms, colours and textures. The complete absence of botanical anomalies in our supermarkets has caused us to regard the consistency of produce presented there as natural. Produce has become a highly designed, repetitive product.

Mutatoes are the last remainders of a once rich and diverse repertoire of colours and shapes that have been replaced by uniform and monochrome industrial cultivars.

Photos by Uli Westphal.

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multiplying meals Artists Lucy and Jorge Orta’s 70 x 7 The Meal, takes its starting point from a multiplication game designed to stimulate conviviality and communication. “We have reinterpreted the biblical signification ‘forever’ (Luke 17:4) using it as a pretext for multiple encounters of seven guests who each invite seven guests, who each invite seven guests...

Ad infinitum,” explains Lucy.

Initiated in 2002, the Ortas have staged over 40 meals across the world. Each

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of the 26 versions of the meals has its own bespoke porcelain and handembroidered never-ending tablecloth.

The unusual, provocative locations on bridges and in galleries also contribute to the experience.

“We transform the ancestral ritual of the meal into an ongoing series of dynamic events, networking people from different horizons, to eat, meet, discuss and debate important issues,” the fashion designer turned artist continues.

Their oeuvre driven by a sense of social responsibility, the Ortas were originally inspired by the work of Rafael Garcia Herreros who created a series of fundraising banquets for the urban social development programme El Minuto de Dios, in the heart of a deprived area in Bogotá in Colombia. The funds raised through these dinners helped to build community schools, family housing with gardens, a theatre, a contemporary art museum, small factories and a university. His project

radically transformed one of the most abandoned zones of the city of Bogotá.

Says Orta: “On discovering his lifelong work, we decided to continue in his memory. His vision demonstrates the energy and capacity of transformation that culture and education can play in regenerating and developing communities.”

Photo by Thierry Bal.

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food political The Conflict Kitchen in Pittsburgh is a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries that the United States is in conflict with. The food is served out of a take-out style storefront, which rotates identities every four months to highlight another country. Each iteration is augmented by events, performances and discussions about the culture, politics and issues at stake with each focus country – Iran, Afghanistan and Venezuela thus far. Through food, wrappers, programming and daily interactions with customers, Conflict Kitchen creates an ongoing platform for first-person discussion about international conflict, culture and politics.

the waterprint of food Through a pop-up restaurant at Beijing Design Week, the Wonderwater Cafe asked “How much water do you eat?” Although it is the first instalment of the project, the cafe is one of a series of Wonderwater projects curated by Jane Withers and Kari Korkman for the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012, and produced by Aalto University. The project aims to raise awareness of global water issues and design for a sustainable future.

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cheese from humans Miriam Simun has developed three strains of cheese made from human breast milk as a provocation about how humanity continues to redesign its food without any sense of self-reflection. Explains Simun: “Human cheese offers a unique entry into these issues. Humans are the only animals to harvest and consume other species’ milk. This milk is neither created for human digestion, nor particularly healthy for human consumption, nor always kind to the animals we harvest and milk. Cheese is one of the oldest biotechnologies. It was also, in 1990, the first genetically modified food product to be approved for sale by the USA Food and Drug Administration.”

blood pudding Biotechnologies like synthetic biology can give detailed insight into our metabolic processes and introduce new interactions with our body.

Speculative designer Tuur van Balen’s “Cook Me: Black Bile” is a recipe that uses bespoke yeasts to measure chemicals in the blood and alter levels of serotonin accordingly, making one feel less or more melancholic. To do so, a dish is cooked from a leech that has first fed itself on the body. A blood mousse is cooked from the parasite’s body, accompanied by oyster mushroom, a red currant sauce and blood sorrel.

The recipe is inspired by Hippocrates’s “Four Humours” theory that sees the body as an entity comprising four basic substances: yellow bile, blood, phlegm and black bile. This theory inspired the medical practice of bloodletting, aimed at restoring physical and mental health by bringing these bodily fluids back into balance.

Each substance is linked to a specific temperament. Black bile, the fictional of these four fluids, evokes the humour of melancholy.

Van Balen says: “This work examines the space between ancient beliefs and future unknowns, between nonsense and science, the kitchen and the pharmacy.”

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food treatment “One day there will be a healthcare service that caters for life with disease.

Until then we have to imagine what it might feel like,” says speculative designer Allison Thompson of her Chronic Facility project.

The Chronic Facility is an alternative system for treating people with chronic disease, based on the service rituals and systems of a restaurant.

It suggests a future outpatient department of the UK’s National Health Service that takes a holistic approach to healthcare by providing a language to discuss issues of living with disease, treatments and diagnosis.

Thompson designed this speculative service from a series of creative modelling workshops where scientists

were asked to imagine themselves as chefs and then build their research using food as the medium. This project designs a way for the public (more specifically people with multiple sclerosis) to engage in and understand science. It also gives people tools – metaphors, physical materials, imagery and confidence – to have conversations about what happens inside their bodies.

As an offshoot to this project, Thompson also created the Five Minute Meal film series in which the scientists explain how to make these models at home. Some of the meals are “How the eye is effected in MS”, “Why identical twins don’t remain identical throughout life” and “The anatomy of the spinal cord”.

mechanical gut Belgian neo-conceptual artist Wim Delvoye is known for creating shocking work. His most famous work, Cloaca, is a digestive machine that turns food into faeces.

Delvoye spent eight years working on the project, consulting with experts in fields ranging from plumbing to gastroenterology. The artist sells the realistically smelling output in glass jars. The mechanical digestive tract has been reinvented in numerous Cloaca remakes. Delvoye was reportedly motivated by the notion that everything is pointless and nothing could be more useless than a machine to turn food into waste.

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colour me healthy Artist Tattfoo Tan developed the Nature Matching System as a reminder to consume your daily-recommended doses of colour. The colours were drawn from Tan’s photographs of fresh fruit and vegetables at farmers markets. “The shades of colour displayed at farmers markets are more than skin deep, reflecting the inner potential of every fruit and vegetable; intense colours might even be called nature’s nutrition labels,” Tan says.

Comprising 88 colours, the work has been turned into a mural in New York, as well as a set of placemats.

nutritious labelling Graphic designer Renée Walker originally started thinking about food labels during an interdisciplinary workshop focused on contemporary health issues and the silent epidemic of obesity. Through the collection of data studying USA eating habits, and an iterative sketching and design process, the project evolved into rethinking how we receive nutritional information about our food. This year, Walker revisited the project, entering and winning a competition created by Berkeley’s New21 and GOOD magazine.

roasted peanuts

hydroenated fats

salt

+5 PRODUCT

PEANUT BUTTER

NUMBER OF INGREDIENTS

8

% Daily Value based on a 2000 calorie diet

CALORIES

190 SERVING SIZE

32g SERVINGS PER CONTAINER

16

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sugar

0

10

20

30

40

10% 25% FAT 17g 6% SODIUM 150mg 3% CARBOHYDRATE 8g 8% FIBER 2g 2% SUGARS 2% CALCIUM 4% IRON

50

60 70

80

90

100

CALORIES 190

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eat me data Graphic designer Lauren Manning documented what she ate, and all its information, for two years. The result of her impressive data collection is 40 different visualisations of her consumption. She explains her motivation as being an exploration into the effectiveness of different types of infographics.

“Exploring various methods, techniques, styles, degrees of complexity, degrees of additional context and many other elements, a true ‘apples to apples’ comparison has emerged,” she says.

draw your food Illustrator David Meldrum documented everything he ate for an entire year.

The resulting 365 works have been executed in numerous mediums including acrylic, collage, watercolour, pen and ink. Besides showing that Meldrum consumed 122 Freddo bars, 34 packets of Tyrrells crisps, 15 fried breakfasts, 1 350 cups of coffee, 91 bowls of porridge and 18 Tunnocks caramel wafers, the resulting exhibition also offered an overview of the state of contemporary food advertising, packaging and signage. Although Meldrum tried hard not to let his food diary influence what he ate, he does confess that he sometimes found himself choosing food based on the packaging being fun to draw.

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Tradition, culture, cooking and gastronomy aside, Martí Guixé works with food simply as an object of mass production. In his Barcelona studio, Delia de Villiers talks to him about the philosophy that drives his food design.

because I am very interested in mass production as a designer and I realised that food is one of the most massproduced things around,” he explains.

The Catalonian designer approaches food within the parameters of product design: “I analyse the usability and the ergonomics of it. Next I analyse the social, political and economic context, and collaborate with somebody who solves the technical problems like the taste, texture and manufacturing.”

s an object, food is highly functional.

It’s predetermined to solving a problem, the human need for nutrition as a means to live. It is this objective, functional aspect that has Martí Guixé interested in food.

Regarded as one of the pioneers of contemporary food design, Guixé first started looking to food as a design object in 1995. “I was interested in food

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Likening the process to the making of a plastic chair, Guixé explains that food design needs to understand the context in which it will be experienced: “If you’re sitting in a plastic chair it is because somebody was producing injection-moulded chairs, possibly at a time when it was popular to do so and oil was much cheaper than it is now.”

So, just as it doesn’t make economic sense to be mass-producing plastic chairs anymore, so we need to

understand the contemporary context of food, Guixé argues. And that context is one that is continuously changing.

“There’s this ongoing economic crisis, which is also a political issue that really should affect food in a certain way,” he points out. This context is not really in the food we eat or the restaurants that we go to, Guixé continues: “If you want a contemporary take on food you have to reflect the continuous changes in society because only then does it speak about the day that we are living.”

Guixé believes that every object needs to have a level of complexity: “I cannot do an object if I don’t care about all these factors and I need to be able to understand them in a holistic way.” It’s about considering where the object comes from and where it goes after it has been used or consumed.

One of Guixé’s first food design projects demonstrates this belief.

“Spamt” takes the Catalan tradition of eating bread with tomato, olive oil and salt, and simplifies the process by turning it into an all-inone food product.

Understanding the context of food is also important if the combination of food and creativity is going to be applied to improve people’s quality of life. “What we eat is so primitive and so stupid that it must be improved and that is what food design can do, because as a discipline gastronomy goes in the wrong direction. Gastronomy offers a selected experience based only on taste and texture, and doesn’t include the more complex social, political and economic parameters. It just tastes more or less good,” Guixé believes.

“Food Karaoke” was one of Guixé’s projects that urge the user to become part of the political and economic system around the food experience.

Users had to follow video instructions,

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Lapin Kulta Solar kitchen restaurant designed by Martí Guixé with chef Antto Melasniemi. Photos by Imagekontainer/Knölke

get their hands dirty and get stuck into preparing their own snack, thereby becoming aware of the process of producing food.

Guixé’s understanding of functionality is extended to the structures that exist around the food industry and our consumption of food. Eliminating any references to cooking, gastronomy and tradition, Guixé is particularly interested in the fact that food, as a product, completely disappears when it is ingested and is then turned into energy.

As such, he has also looked at alternative ways of ingesting food and drink. The “Gat Fog Party” saw an artificial indoor fog made of gin and tonic distributed throughout a room in a misty haze. Thinking beyond taste sensations, the “I-Cakes” saw the ingredients in the cake visually represented on the baked goods in the form of a graph, highlighting the percentage each

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ingredient contributed to the final product. “It’s decoration becoming information”, reads his website.

Despite these projects seeming to be somewhat theatrical, one of the problems with food design, Guixé reflects, is that it requires a kind of performance. But, he says, “food design shouldn’t be about performance because then it just becomes performing with food and not food design”.

For the moment though, food design is still a very academic thing for Guixé. Making it more accessible to the public is a question of time.

“I don’t know how to make it more accessible. It is something that happened slowly. Ten years ago it was completely incredible for a lot of design magazines but now there are schools and organisations teaching food design. But it’s still just the beginning phase, it needs another 10 or 20 years,” he concludes.

Martí Guixé www.designindaba.com/speaker/marti-guixe

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Printed on Sappi Triple Green Print Silk 135g/m2 and 250g/m2

Swapping pots and pans for lasers and liquid nitrogen, Maciek Dubla chats to Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche of Moto restaurant about the benefits of food replication and miracle berries.

under the name Moto. Knowing that sushi wasn’t what he wanted to do, he convinced his benefactors to let him experiment by cooking for them.

any of us have fond memories of the food we ate as children. Sweet foods were sweet because of natural sugars and flavours exploded in our mouths because of Mother Nature’s touch.

These days, it takes a lot to impress our world-weary palates, which have become hardened to anything less than junk food levels of sugar and fat.

Rather than changing what people like, Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche have spent years developing unusual cooking techniques to replicate food everyone loves with healthier substitutes and mind-twisting flavour experiences.

After graduating from Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Institute in Portland, Oregon, and then being fired from Chicago’s Charlie Trotter in late 2003, Cantu was approached to open a sushi restaurant

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It didn’t take much and in January 2004, Moto went from a sushi restaurant to part-kitchen part-sciencelab and an entirely new gastronomic experience. As an insider’s joke, they still do serve sushi – well, a “this is not a pipe” surreal type of sushi at least.

After printing out a picture of maki rolls on edible paper, Cantu infuses it with the flavours of a real maki roll and serves it with chopsticks.

While working at Charlie Trotter, Cantu met Roche, a young pastry chef with a mind much like his own. Having bonded over their love of innovative cooking, Cantu hired Roche in June 2004.

“While I’m a pastry chef, I’m also one of the leaders in the creative department,” Roche explains while on the phone at Moto. “Every week we try to come up with new ideas to take an element of something or a dish, and change it to get people to re-engage with the food they eat.”

One of their signature dishes is the nachos dessert. The dish consists of candied chips, chocolate made to look like beef and slivers of mango

frozen in liquid nitrogen as a cheese topping. While your eyes see nachos and are ready to experience the creamy cheese and tangy salsa, your taste buds are blown away by the sudden sweet sensations, allowing you to experience the flavours in a more intense and explosive manner.

Do they enjoy seeing people’s reactions? “We don’t stand behind the curtain and laugh at people,” the exuberant young chef chuckles.

“We create dishes we would want to experience and messing with the diner’s head comes later. Ideas stem from what we want to see happen and then steering it in a direction that makes sense.”

In the Moto kitchen you would think that you were stepping into a laboratory rather than a restaurant kitchen, but having gadgets such as a Class IV laser in a kitchen is necessary when finding creative ways to pair wine and food.

“We wanted to find out how far we could take food and wine pairing.

By taking orange-flavoured paper and vaporising it into a wine glass using the laser, the mixture of the wine with the vapour in the glass intensifies the taste of the wine,” Cantu breaks it down with the intonations of a mad scientist.

But for Cantu, all the fun is entrenched with a serious need to create healthier ways of eating and forward-thinking green products. Diners should also expect to eat their menu once they’re done ordering their meal. The Moto menu is printed on edible paper that is continually changing flavour, anything from a burger and chips to gourmet paninis.

“Every year, 20 tons of paper is wasted by restaurants alone. By getting people to eat their menus, we have found a way to not only reduce waste, but a sustainable way to save paper and for diners to have an interesting experience,” Cantu enthuses.

As founder of Cantu Designs, a firm specialising in highly innovative patent-pending food technology, Cantu has been working for a number of years either using existing methods in science or developing completely new techniques to help people not only eat better, but still eat the same foods they’ve always loved.

“Burgers, fries and cola inspire me because these are the foods I loved as a child, but how do I give myself that fix now without clogging up my body?” he asks quite pointedly.

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Nachos photo by Homaro Cantu.

All other photos by Michael Ruggierello.

He may have found the answer after six years of in-depth research into the miracle berry. This small red berry found in Africa has the ability to sweeten sour foods, without the aid of any refined sugars. The oldest mention of the berry is in 1725 by a French explorer, Chevalier des Marchais, in West Africa. He came across a tribe that ate not only the food they farmed, but also vegetation around them, anything from grass and hay to leaves that had fallen from trees. They would eat this little red berry and then help themselves to just about anything they could find around them. At the time, they were the only tribe in West Africa that didn’t have a famine problem.

Cantu realised the contemporary potential of the berry when he was asked to help a cancer patient going through chemotherapy to eat again.

“Since the patient could only taste things that were metallic and rubbery, they had lost their appetite. I had them eat a miracle berry tablet and for an hour afterwards, the patient ate their first meal in six years because they could taste the flavours again,” Cantu describes.

Since helping that one cancer patient, over the past six years Cantu has

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helped a little over 10 000 people in regaining their taste of flavours, giving them back their appetites and helping them fight for their lives.

Cancer patients aren’t the only ones to benefit from this little fruit. By eliminating the need to add refined sugar to foods, the berry effectively removes sugar from the human diet, helping with weight loss and healthy eating while still eating sweet.

This berry also has the potential to be part of the solution in fighting global hunger for the almost 1 billion people who suffer from it every year. With the ability to make any vegetation edible, hunger could be eradicated if people could use whatever’s around them as sustenance. Accessibility is key to making this happen and Cantu is in the process of manufacturing an inhalable form of the miracle berry, reducing the cost of it to under the price of sugar.

Continually striving to push boundaries in the cooking world, there are many projects under way that have Cantu and Roche excited. Still hush-hush at the moment, Cantu hints to an oven the size of your palm that can heat up to 500°C but is cool to the touch, and something else he likes to call "green disruptive cooking technology".

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Printed on Sappi Triple Green Print Silk 135g/m2 and 250g/m2

The origins of many of the most ingenious food designs have long been lost in the ubiquity of everyday consumables. Kelly Berman goes in search of the stories behind some of the most common supermarket items.

anonymous, unwitting food designers for centuries. Designing food is about more than playing with food to manipulate its shape, colour and texture. It speaks to economics, ergonomics and the endless human desire for something new, as these common supermarket items show.

esign has played a role in what lands up on our dinner plates for as long as animals have been domesticated and plants have been cultivated. “I think it’s the oldest form of art,” says Martin Hablesreiter, architect and co-author with Sonja Stummerer of Food Design XL. “You first need to feed the guy who’s painting the wall in the cave. People had to do something with the food they found – they started to conserve it, transport it, make it better.”

The need to make food easier to prepare, transport, preserve and, ultimately, eat has motivated

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Carrots Asking why carrots are orange might sound like a question for a horticulturist, but the truth is that you might be better off asking a political scientist – or a Dutch football fan. The tawny coloured vegetable actually exists in nature in a rainbow of colours, from red, yellow and white to purple.

Orange carrots allegedly became the norm in 17th-century Holland, when farmers are thought to have cultivated them to show their loyalty to William of Orange, who led the struggle for Dutch independence. Though they are now the de facto carrot, the orange cultivars may not even have existed before the 16th century, say some scholars. They were probably formed when Eastern (purple), Western (white and red) and wild carrots were crossed, more than likely in Turkey.

Pasta Pasta is the ultimate example of how shape can subtly affect the taste and texture of food. The traditional shapes evolved for a purpose – from the frilly edges of lasagne, which facilitates overlapping the edges of each sheet to stop the sauce from leaking, to the pinched middle of the butterfly-shaped farfalle, which keeps them al dente and is handy for retaining sauce.

Why then the long, slippery strands of spaghetti, which make it difficult to eat? Hablesreiter says the shape dates back to the earliest days of drying pasta in Naples when the most economical use of space was to hang long narrow strips on ropes, washingline style.

Pasta shapes have changed with the times too. Radiatori – meaning “radiators” – were created between the world wars to mimic the design of old industrial heaters, which had a straight pipe with concentric, parallel fins. Besides presenting consumers with a novel shape, the design of radiatori creates more surface area to absorb flavour and trap sauce. Unmistakably floral-looking, campanelle, also known as gigli,

seem to have been designed purely to deliver a more fantastical pasta shape to appeal to consumers.

Cornish Pasties While richly flavoured pasties were originally eaten only by England’s royalty and wealthy upper crust in the 13th century, the Cornish Pasty had humble beginnings as a packed lunch for tin and copper miners in Cornwall in the 18th and 19th century. The pastry pocket was ingeniously designed to be the portable and nutritious meal miners needed to get through a hard day’s slog underground.

The pastry was thick enough to contain its filling of beef, potatoes, onion and turnip, while some even had a sweet filling at the other end so the miner could enjoy a bit of dessert. Additionally, the curved crust allowed the miner to hold his lunch without worrying about his dirty hands, sometimes traced with arsenic from the mines.

As the Cornish mining industry collapsed, many miners went to places such as the USA, Australia and South Africa in search of work, taking their traditional pies with them.

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All pictures taken from Food Design XL done by Honey & Bunny.

Bananas We may have monkeys to thank for demonstrating how to eat bananas, but the fruit as we know it today could not have existed without human intervention. Although the exact history is unknown, the evidence is in the fact that grocer-issued bananas do not have seeds, so they cannot reproduce on their own. Wild bananas are actually packed with many large, hard seeds, making them difficult to eat.

Over the thousands of years that humans have domesticated bananas, we’ve also selected other features that suit our lifestyles: Their elegant curve makes them easy to hold and their colouring indicates ripeness.

All round, the modern-day banana is a highly successful product of “intelligent design”.

Pretzels While not everyone agrees on how pretzels got their distinctive looped shape, the most common tale is that an Italian monk came up with the baked snack in 610AD as a reward to children who learned their prayers.

The looped design was supposed to resemble arms crossing the chest

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and was called "pretiola", meaning “little rewards”. The ingredients of pretzels also have Christian significance: They were made with only flour and water so that they could be eaten during Lent, when Christians are forbidden to eat eggs, lard or dairy products.

Pizza Step inside any $2-slice pizza parlour in New York City and you’ll soon realise why the popular pie is round.

The baker takes a piece of dough, and twirls it around and around his finger, naturally forming a circle. “Form follows production,” says Hablesreiter.

“It is the easiest way to produce a super-thin piece of dough.”

Fish fingers Fish fingers cram texture, taste, shape and production methods into one successful, compact design. They were invented by Clarence Birdseye, founder of Birdseye Seafoods Inc, whose much more significant invention was finding a way to flash-freeze food after working as a naturalist in the Arctic for the USA government. There he observed how the Inuit people used a combination of ice, wind and low temperatures to freeze just-caught fish almost instantly. He subsequently developed a system that cut fish into rectangular Lego-like pieces and packed them into waxed-cardboard cartons, which were flash-frozen under high pressure.

Before it became America’s most popular street food, however, pizza began life as a kind of plate for poor Neapolitans to carry their food to be cooked in a communal oven in the city centre. The items on top of the dough were too hot to be picked up by hand, so the baked dough became a portable surface that was then easy to eat on the street. “It’s a bit perverse nowadays to see pizza eaten on a plate!” exclaims Hablesreiter.

Things really took off for the humble fish finger when it was introduced to Britain after World War II. With its golden crumbed coating and abstract shape, fish fingers were palatable to Britons, who traditionally hated fish.

Much of that appeal had to do with its crunchy exterior and softer filling.

“We have many sensitive nerve endings inside our mouths, so food products that combine different textures are much more appealing,” notes Hablesreiter.

The future So what about the future of food design? While the jury’s still out on the ethics and consequences, genetically modified crops have become the norm in many countries such as the USA, China, India and South Africa.

The FDA is already evaluating its first GMO animal: Atlantic salmon that have had two foreign DNA sequences inserted into their genomes to make them grow to full size in almost half the amount of time as regular salmon. Canada is dipping its toes in trademarking too, with the Enviropig™ – a limited production of pigs whose genes have been tinkered with to produce 65% less phosphorous in their waste.

As we seek ways to streamline the production of food and enhance our experience of it, we’ve entered new territory where the limits of how far design can go are only now beginning to be pushed.

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Printed on Sappi Triple Green Print Silk 135g/m2 and 250g/m2

Photo by David Loftus

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Even though he might rightly be regarded as one of the originators of food pornography, Jamie Oliver has never been about overindulgence.

Jo Parsons considers the legacy of this tireless campaigner against obesity.

Oliver’s activist roots emerged in 2002 with the launch of Fifteen. The project selected 15 young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds, with criminal records or a history of drug abuse, to be trained in the restaurant business. Not without its controversy and challenges, the concept proved so successful it was established in four locations – London (2002), Amsterdam (2004), Cornwall and Melbourne (both 2006). Fifteen now forms part of the Jamie Oliver Foundation and has helped 220 young people graduate from its ranks.

ove him or hate him, Jamie Oliver is probably the most famous and prolific of the band of celebrity chefs to emerge from the United Kingdom in the 1990s. His rise from celebrity chef to international TV personality has been short but gruelling.

He has published 15 cookbooks, launched 30 restaurants, appeared in more than 19 of his own TV series, endorsed cookware and pans for Tefal, been the face of Sainsbury’s, and launched his own collection, Jme. He is also a family man, married to Jools, with four young children. At 36 years old, he shows no sign of slowing down with a new restaurant chain, Union Jacks, planned for November.

While his critics have accused him of spreading himself too thin, one thing can’t be ignored – the man has passion. That passion is not only channelled into the profit-making machine that is jamieoliver.com but more importantly into fighting an unglamorous war on obesity.

What started out in late 1990s with the “Naked Chef” encouraging people to introduce the fun back into cooking by using fresh seasonal ingredients, has expanded into a tour de force that includes the School Dinners/ Feed Me Better campaign, Fifteen Foundation, Ministry of Food and, his latest and most ambitious project, the Food Revolution.

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In 2003 Oliver focused his attentions on improving the standard of Britain’s school meals in the Feed Me Better campaign that formed the basis of the School Dinners TV documentary series. Oliver took responsibility for running the kitchen in Kidbrooke School, Greenwich, for a year where he set about replacing menu items like the fat-laden Turkey Twizzlers with fresh vegetables, pasta and a diet rich in nutrients. Oliver’s approach was not always welcomed – parents of one school passed hamburgers and chips through school fences in protest. However, he was not deterred and studies confirmed that children’s performance had improved thanks to the new menus. The public campaign led to the British government committing £280 million to improving school dinners and Oliver was also named “Most Inspiring Political Figure of 2005” by Channel 4 News.

The Ministry of Food campaign was launched in 2008. Initially set in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, it aimed to teach the local community to learn how to cook fresh food and establish healthy eating as part of daily life.

The project took its name from the organisation that was set up during World War II to show Britons how to make the most of wartime food shortages. Oliver states in his manifesto: “Sixty years later, we are again at risk of malnutrition but of a different sort, because we no longer have the

knowledge of how to cook and use ingredients.” The frightening evidence is clear when Oliver asks primary school children to identify vegetables like tomatoes and potatoes, and they can only hazard a guess.

Not content with saving his fellow countrymen, Oliver travelled to the United States with the launch of his TV series Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.

Understanding that the USA was facing a massive crisis, he wanted to get people cooking from scratch, eating fresh fruit and vegetables, and off a diet of processed foods. He started his crusade in Huntington, West Virginia, which Associated Press had named “America’s fattest city” in 2008. Far from welcoming the chef, much of the town rejected his healthy eating ideology, leaving Oliver frustrated and in tears.

In 2010 Oliver’s campaign was recognised with the TED Prize. The $100 000 prize is awarded to an exceptional individual who presents their “One Wish to Change the World” during the TED Conference. Oliver’s presentation was an impassioned plea to “Teach every child about food”, exposing the travesty of the American food landscape and highlighting the growing obesity crisis. He shone the spotlight on 16-year-olds with six years to live, giant-sized coffins to bury the obese and wheelbarrows full of sugar from school-sponsored flavoured milk.

The video has had more than 1.5 million hits since it aired in February 2010.

Nonetheless, obesity is not an issue that attracts public empathy in the same way that HIV/Aids, TB or cancer does. It is a topic that seems to invoke shame for the inherent laziness and gluttony it represents. Obesity and the rise of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) also point at some of modern society’s worst innovations – fats disguised as food, chemicals masquerading as flavours, and gadgets and pills promising to help you lose weight without leaving your seat.

Oliver is calling for a food revolution to help reverse the tide.

His advocacy is twofold: Get individuals and communities to start changing their ways, in addition to campaigning for change on a governmental level.

In September 2011, Oliver penned an open letter to Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations, on the eve of the UN Summit to discuss NCDs. The letter was a call to action, asking for people all across the world to join the Food Revolution, help get countries and global leaders to work together, and improve education and legislation, in order to reduce the number of deaths from NCDs and obesity-related diseases.

Thirty-four heads of state attended the summit and unanimously adopted the Political Declaration on NCDs. The NCD Alliance agreed that “the global burden and threat of NCDs constitutes one of the major challenges for development in the 21st century, which undermines social and economic development throughout the world”. The approved political declaration calls for an agenda by the end of 2012 to take action on reducing and preventing NCDs. The World Health Organisation has been tasked with monitoring and preparing the recommended goals.

Whether you see Jamie Oliver as a passionate foodie, working-class hero or self-promoting celebrity chef, the truth is that obesity and NCDs are a serious global issue. This is a war that needs to be waged on all fronts – in the home, on the high street and at government level. Jamie Oliver, armed with a wooden spoon and passion, is ready for the battle.

Jo Parsons is a freelance project manager with a background in social history, food, wine and publishing. She loves tomatoes, jazz and living in Vredehoek. Twitter: @robertandjolove.

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Edible Rosary by Sergio Herman of Restaurant Oud Sluis. Photo by Tony le Duc.

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Printed on Sappi Triple Green Print Silk 135g/m2 and 250g/m2

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Can what we eat predict the future? Just like the catwalk, our plates are always chasing the next new, writes food trend forecaster Marjan Ippel.

In the first edition of my yearly stylebook on food trends, What (Not) To Eat 2010, I quoted the German Princess Palatine, who lived from 1652 to 1722. In a letter to her family back in Germany, this sister-in-law of Louis XIV writes about the food trends she introduced to the royal fashionistas at the Versailles court: “I have also made Westphalian-type raw hams fashionable here. Everybody eats them now, just like many of our German foods: Sauerkraut!” hat distinguishes human beings?

Their ability to tweet digitally? Walk on dizzying heels? Tell Freudian jokes? Or, as food designer Martin Hablesreiter says – and I may be freestyling a bit here – our incessant drive to change the appearance of our foods into shapes that correspond with our lifestyle and the zeitgeist?

I’m with Hablesreiter. If only because this supports my personal adagio that food is equal to fashion. Like fashion, the way we eat, prepare and design our food is an early signal of economic, political and demographic changes in society.

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In a time when sophistication, glamour, bling and other ostentations reflected in the silver plates that were passed around at the exuberant dinner parties of the court, a basic peasantlike food such as sauerkraut came into fashion. Was the fermented cabbage welcomed as an exotic novelty that contrasted so refreshingly with the Sun King’s craving for the freshest possible greens from his own garden?

Or might it have been a signal of times that were a-changing?

Like the Sun King, we are now looking for the freshest seasonal experiences.

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Edible Joint by Jonnie Boer of Librije. Photo by Jan Bartelsman.

We want to gather our foods in the wild or, at least, on our own rooftop garden. Though, contrary to this 14th Louis who put sculpted food very much in vogue, today we like to eat our foraged grub without too many alterations. Holistic and recognisable, showing its humble descent: From a whole pig on the dinner table at The Breslin restaurant in New York, to an entire carrot on many other restaurant plates – including its foliage, skin and even the earth from which it was drawn.

But while we, the followers of food fashion, savour the freshest possible, forward-looking chefs are wildly experimenting with matured foods.

For, again, times they are a-changing.

“We’ve always thought that food needs to be eaten as young and freshly as possible. We were wrong!” says the visionary Nordic forager chef René Redzepi from his Copenhagen restaurant, Noma.

In a no-waste attempt to stretch food across seasons and make inedible parts edible, he now develops what he calls

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“vintage” foods by taking traditional preserving methods like dry-aging and fermenting to a new level. And, while he’s at it, thereby taking slow food to a novel height by making potatoes, seaweeds and carrots ripen like wine, sauerkraut or (Dutch) cheese for up to two years. In this extended ripening period, the fare develops a personal taste history.

vintage carrot that was buried underground for two years, to the compost cookie of New York chef David Chang's Momofuku Milkbar.

Chang’s cookie looks like it’s been rescued from a fashionable compost heap on some NYC apartment balcony, containing recognisable residuals of coffee, pretzels, potato chips, oat meal and chocolate sprinkles.

This synchronises with our zeitgeist that prescribes that all things we wear, sit on, live in, drive with, eat from, listen to or watch, posses a vintage feel with a unique history. In rebellion against all industrial stuff that comes in anonymous millions, chefs and food designers alike want to take food out of obscurity and give it a “face”.

Not just the face of the farmer who produced it. But also in itself.

Others also provide their ingredients with a history. Named after the Dutch 17th-century Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie that sailed to the EastIndies, in the London-based Punch House VOC, complete cocktails and punches are being aged in old barrels.

After a period of shaping foods into abstract dots, squares and triangles, chefs now want to show the food as it really is. Like the fashion designers that use old, worn materials, they want to show the wear and tear.

Unplugged. From Redzepi’s

But how to fit in those chefs who, like way back at the Versailles court, sculpt their food into figurative works of art? The edible rosary by Dutch chef Sergio Herman, the praying hands by the Israeli-Dutch Moshik Roth or the edible joint by Jonnie Boer can simply be seen as a consequence of food as a storyteller. But the ultimate example of edible storytelling might very well be jellifying, the food preserving

method that too was fashionable at the Louis XIV court. By making jellies out of beets or any other food, the Jelly Mongers in London and Being a Jellybar in Amsterdam visualise complete, though wobbly, stories that comment on our society.

Although the fooderati now forage in the history of food, picking what they need to shape the current vintagedriven zeitgeist, no one just simply copies and pastes the old. Vintage never means “unchanged”. It means touched by the signs of times. Food is fashion!

Marjan Ippel is food trend curator cum food writer for Dutch titles such as Delicious, Winelife and Sabor; founder of the Underground Boerenmarkt and author of the yearly stylebook on food trends What (Not) To Eat (now available as an app). Website: www.talkinfood.nl

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By Delia de Villiers

MeNu DesIgN IN aMeRIca 1850 TO 1985 steven heller, John Mariani and Jim heimann Published by Taschen, with nearly 800 examples, Menu Design in America 1850 to 1985 looks at a form of graphic design that complements the experience of dining out. Covering a period of more than 100 years, the book looks past the menu as a culinary listing, marketing tool or keepsake, using it for clues about the history of restaurants and dining out in the uSA.

FOOD DesIgN xl sonja summerer and Martin hablesreiter In its simplest form, food design is what happens when we cook, cut, stir, combine and add things to the colour, smell, consistency and production of food. Published by Springer Vienna Architecture, Food Design XL examines how and why we change food, which in its natural state is already fit for consumption. The book considers the process of producing and transporting food, while still ensuring that it looks good.

MODeRNIsT cuIsINe Dr Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet Published by the Cooking Lab in six volumes, Modernist Cuisine looks at food and cooking from the perspective of the history and fundamentals, techniques and equipment, animals and plants, ingredients and preparations, plated-dish recipes, and kitchen manual. By borrowing techniques from the laboratory and pioneering chefs, Modernist Cuisine sets out to revolutionise the art of cooking by incorporating a deeper understanding of science and technology.

DelIcaTe: NeW FOOD culTuRe edited by R Klanten, K Bolhรถfer, A Mollard and s ehmann As it becomes increasingly important to take note of the political, social and economic factors driving food, so too is eating becoming an expression of our mindset, identity, culture and aspirations. Published

by Gestalten, Delicate is a visually rich look at how young creative entrepreneurs, who share a passion for food and the eating experience, are challenging food and eating to be more imaginative and responsible.

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PasTa by DesIgN George L Legendre Published by Thames & Hudson and with a foreword by Paola Antonelli, George L Legendre applies phylogeny (the study of relatedness among natural forms) to classify 92 different kinds of pasta. This idiosyncratic exploration of pasta includes a pasta family tree, equations and diagrams that show each ridge and crimp of the pasta, the geographical origin, its manufacturing process, and its etymology, alongside suggestions for preparing the ideal pasta.

gReaT FOOD Penguin Great Food is a box set of 20 gorgeously designed paperbacks published by Penguin. The collection brings together the sharpest, funniest and most delicious recipes and recollections from 20 authors. Including a Middle Eastern feast, a taste of sun and a murder in a kitchen, alongside food histories and chef stories, Great Food is a must for any food lover’s bookshelf.

FOOD FOR FReeDOM As one of the most iconic and influential leaders of our time, nearly all aspects of Nelson Mandela’s life have been documented in one way or another. But Anna Trapido’s “gastro-political history with recipes” is a first, and a particularly fresh look at the life and times of Madiba.

Published by Jacana, Hunger for Freedom is subtitled "The Story of Food in the Life of Nelson Mandela" and considers Madiba’s journey through the perspective of food, capturing the bitter and the sweet of his life.

More than a recipe book, Hunger for Freedom looks at the role that food played in Madiba’s journey, from roasting mielies in his boyhood and what he ate on his first teenage date, to his wedding cakes and treason trial lunch packs, not to mention the meals he had no choice of in prison and the first thing he ate when out of prison, the story is candid. Mandela’s status aside, the book demonstrates how food cuts through class, race and rank to reveal something of the daily existence of a very real man.

In many instances, Madiba’s hunger for food matched his hunger for freedom. The food the great man enjoyed in his life and shared with people from all walks of life defined, in one way or another, his commitment to the struggle for equality. With interesting stories, funny anecdotes and delicious recipes, Hunger for Freedom shows how food can be used as a cross-cultural social tool that can communicate emotional messages.

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By Delia de Villiers

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Great British Chefs Bringing together the culinary expertise of 12 chefs from the UK, this app features three menus of five courses from each of the chefs, including how-to films. There’s also a voice control function allowing you to make a shopping list quickly and easily.

Graphic design duo Hat-trick worked on the branding.

Freshlist The Freshlist app helps fresh produce vendors make sales and buyers find what they’re looking for at a convenient location. Vendors post their inventories onto the virtual marketplace via SMS and buyers enter their shopping list into the app. Using GPS, the app then lists all the shops in the area that stock the needed inventory.

FoodTruck FastPass FoodTruck FastPass uses social media to help mobile food cart businesses to connect with their foodie fans.

More comprehensive than Facebook or Twitter, customers can track the location of the food carts via Google Maps. Foodtruck owners can also take online orders, broadcast daily specials and sold-out items, and generate coupons and loyalty cards.

Kalles Egg Timer Cooking an egg to perfection is an exact science and it’s here that the Kalles Egg Timer app comes in handy with its exact indication of remaining cooking time. Music is a great accompaniment to food and so the app comes with a playlist to listen to while waiting for the egg to boil.

Once the egg is ready the music stops, indicating that it is time to eat.

iCookbook Digital cooking apps are great, but for the splatter of food that inevitably lands on the device. The iCookbook iPad app has an interactive culinary solution to this problem. By using voice-controlled features the ingredients can stay where they need to be, rather than all over the gadget. It comes with more than 2 000 recipes.

Cupcakes!

The Cupcakes! app lets you bake and eat a cupcake, virtually. Start by selecting cupcake liners, fill the pan with cake batter and bake it in the oven before the real fun begins.

Choose from a wide range of icing and decorations in different shapes and colours to create a little cupcake masterpiece. Great fun for kids and kidults.

Printed on Sappi Triple Green Print Silk 135g/m2 and 250g/m2

Printed on Sappi Triple Green Print Silk 135g/m2 and 250g/m2

Seafood Watch With many of our oceanic food resources under threat, the Seafood Watch app by the Monterey Bay Aquarium is an ethical dining companion. It tells you how sustainable various fish types are, helping you decide whether to eat them. The Project FishMap feature lets you add and search for sustainable seafood restaurants and shops near you.

Fooducate The Fooducate app is a downloadable nutritionist at your beck and call. By scanning the barcode of the food, the app feeds back information about its nutritional value and what it’s made of. More constructively, the app also suggests healthier alternatives and lets you share food information with other Fooducate users.

Top Shelf The Top Shelf app is like having a professional bartender on tap. By giving you a recipe to make a cocktail using the boozy ingredients you have on-hand, Top Shelf makes it easy to throw a spontaneous party without a trip to the liquor store. Depending on the ingredients, you might end up with some crazy concoctions!

Locavore Simple but effective, the Locavore app helps you know what food is in season in the places you are travelling to. It is organised by region and, using your phone’s GPS location, it alerts you to what is the best, locally produced food to be eating at a given destination and where to procure it. It also recommends recipes for fresh produce.

Wild Edibles Drawing on the knowledge of “The Wildman” Steve Brill, the Wild Edibles app makes it easy to identify and use edible wild plants while foraging.

Multiple photos, detailed descriptions, similar plants, poisonous lookalikes and medicinal information improve your knowledge, encouraging you to get your kitchen in touch with nature.

Gojee Gojee works like your personal food planner slash cookbook slash “your mother who knows your preferances best”. It handpicks recipes from established food writers with great photography, and then makes recommendations based on what’s in your fridge and what you’re craving. It’s a great way to discover new dishes and ideas from different blogs and websites.

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PROMOTION

Grand extensions Foodcorp, South Africa’s third largest food manufacturer, is ever vigilant of trends in the food industry and consumer demand, and is dedicated to culinary innovation and creativity.

Foodcorp produces a diverse range of food products that include peanut butter, canned pilchards, rusks, mageu (traditional South African non-alcoholic drink made from maize), and even pet food.

Foodcorp’s main objective is to ensure that its products appeal to the South African mass consumer market (approximately 70% of South Africa’s total population) and that a product like Yum Yum Peanut Butter, for example, becomes a household brand enjoyed by all members of the family.

Foodcorp has a proven track record of extending its brands through product and packaging innovations.

It was the first food manufacturer in the South African market to fortify its milled flour and maize products; first to introduce plastic polyethylene terephihalate (PET) packaging in the peanut butter product category; first to introduce plastic squeezable bottles in the mayonnaise product category; and first to use re-sealable screw-top cartons in the mageu market. These innovations have helped to distinguish these products within their individual food categories through their novel appearance and by providing more convenient and safe packaging to consumers.

What’s more, many products have received several recognitions for innovation: Yum Yum Peanut Butter was voted “Product of the Year” in the spreads division, while Nola Cholestro Go was voted “Product of the Year” in the edible oil division, in the Consumer Survey of Products Innovation in South Africa in 2010. Impressive!

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Further proof of Foodcorp’s dedication to innovate its brands in an effort to maintain and increase its consumer base, was the launch of an Innovation Centre in Cape Town in October 2008.

The Innovation Centre is the creative hub where new innovations are developed to suit changing consumer tastes, and enhance existing product ranges across all consumer profiles.

The Innovation Centre has been recognised for its unique design style and was a finalist in the One Show awards in the USA in April 2009 in the category “Environmental Design: Single”. The Centre was also awarded a Silver Loerie in September 2009 in the category “Environmental Graphics”.

Never tiring of finding ways to expand its brands, in June this year Foodcorp partnered with Design Indaba to promote an awesome branding project.

The emerging creative talents of young South Africans were put to the test at 10 design schools across South Africa to produce innovative ideas including packaging, marketing and advertising in a quest to take Foodcorp’s iconic brands to a new level for our loyal South African consumers.

Julliette Morrison, Foodcorp’s Group Marketing Director, says: “Foodcorp continually demonstrates its commitment to producing truly South African brands and we are just as committed to growing young local talent, with a strong belief in building local expertise in design alongside food innovation. We are delighted to be partnering with Design Indaba on this unique challenge and eagerly await the results that the project is sure to inspire in the young designers.”

Printed on Sappi Triple Green Print Silk 135g/m2 and 250g/m2

WHAT DID THE SUGAR CANE SAY TO MASUGA? I’M YOUR DADDY!