“Some food designers might say they’re talking about society and using food as a way to highlight this, but really it’s entertainment for middle-class people who like to be entertained by these sorts of things.”
Cerf was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, California in February. 22
Although it’s worth pointing out that food, while physical, is no less ephemeral – perishability is practically inbuilt. But ephemerality is part of the appeal for most food designers.“There’s a short life for these projects,” says Jacopo Sarzi. “A project lasts a few months and then you start from scratch again. You don’t have time to get bored of your own projects.” 23
READING LIST Eat Love, Marije Vogelzang. BIS Publishers, 2009. Food Designing, Martí Guixé & Inga Knolke. Corraini Editore, 2011. CrEATe: Eating Design and Future Food, Martin Raymond & Chris Sanderson. Die Gestalten Verlag, 2008. Thank you to: Another Country, East London Cheese Board, SCP and Skandium for providing products for this shoot.
> In this sense, food has become a way in which we interpret our identities and the culture around us. It’s not that this was absent before – there have always been food cultures – just that the cultural role of food, a physical medium, has developed a more pressing edge in light of the mass digitisation of other areas of culture. At a time when Google vice-president and “Father of the Internet” Vint Cerf is warning of a “digital dark age”,22 in which we risk the mass loss of cultural and emotional digital artefacts (such as digital photographs and emails) as technological formats advance and old files become unreadable, food represents something tangible and physical23 to latch onto, and through which to understand the world around us. Which could leave the food designer free to assume the role of a kind of cultural provocateur. They’re there to teach us things in much the same way that any artist or speculative designer might; what separates them is the medium through which they achieve this. To return to Deresiewicz: “Food, for young people now, is creativity, commerce, politics, health, almost religion.”
Baltz’s idea is theoretical, but matches up with the way that many food designers choose to work. So Vogelzang’s suspended tablecloth dinner was not a literal proposal for how we ought to eat, but rather an effort to place all diners on the same level, thereby emphasising food’s potential as a social leveller. Ditto, while Sarti’s multi-stem coffeepot is available to buy, it’s most potent as a reminder of food’s function as a social glue. “When I started working with food, ‘food design’ just meant the industrial design of the shape of new cookies, or the shape of new snacks,” says Sarti. “Now it’s more powerful as a way to look at everyday life and where food can bring you in terms of experiencing something, or getting in touch with other people.” It is a point with which Baltz agrees. “Food is the most fundamental material of consumption,” she says. “It gives us life and when we start to see in that vein, we begin to treat it as material in a design relationship. So we have a relationship with our planet because of the way we’ve designed our agricultural system, and we should question if that relationship is healthy or unhealthy. There are positive ways and negative ways to understand the world, and one positive way is to understand that we’re in systems and relationships with things around us. Food has always been a connector in those relationships; a kind of ‘and’.”
So how do you define food design if the designers themselves seem to range from those who literally design foodstuffs, through to those who simply use food as a tool to explore cultural phenomena? The most precise definition that it seems possible to give is that a food designer is someone who designs food, or someone who designs with, around or about food; although it’s worth noting that this definition will also admit cutlery designers and their ilk as food designers. Whether this is a problem is a matter of opinion, but the following remarks from Earlwyn Covington are worth remembering: “I believe the walls between any kind of creative discipline should be blurry. I like things to cross and interlock, and I go head-to-head with academics and school administrations who want to separate things. We live in the 21st century; disciplines are definitely fluid.” This fluidity lies at the heart of contemporary food design. “I think we’re still in the exploration phase of food design,” agrees Vogelzang, “and I think it’s good to prolong that phase for as long as possible. Various people take various stands when it comes to food design and that’s great because obviously we need the right ideology when it comes to the discipline, but it’s so new that it’s still very free and open. You can make it what you want and there’s a blank slate there, which is a nice space to be in. I think we need a couple more years there yet.” And this tone of uncertainty is a good note to end on. While the emergence of the three food design MAs suggests an institutionalisation and final codification of the discipline, food design fundamentally remains frontier territory; an anything-goes hinterland.
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96 Disegno. A NEW FRONTIER