Food for thought

An image from the Aphrodisiac Cafe at the Museum of Sex, New York. Photos by Craig Baxter/Supplied.
An image from the Aphrodisiac Cafe at the Museum of Sex, New York. Photos by Craig Baxter/Supplied.
A range of cocktails inspired by love.
A range of cocktails inspired by love.
Pareidoilia, a cocktail flavoured with ouzo and nigorizake and created by Dutch artist Bart Hess,...
Pareidoilia, a cocktail flavoured with ouzo and nigorizake and created by Dutch artist Bart Hess, is served on a black plate with a ribbed bottom.
Food designer Emilie Baltz.
Food designer Emilie Baltz.
Together with three colleagues, a chef, composer and an interior designer, New York food designer...
Together with three colleagues, a chef, composer and an interior designer, New York food designer Emilie Baltz opened What Happens When, a pop-up restaurant where design dictates food rather than the chef and the menu.
A dish from What Happens When inspired by children's picture book Where the Wild Things Are, by...
A dish from What Happens When inspired by children's picture book Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak.

The Otago Polytechnic is hosting an international food design conference this week, with food designer Emilie Baltz, from New York, as keynote speaker. She tells Charmian Smith about the excitement of experiencing food with all your senses.

Food design has been around probably since humans started using fire, but we have only had the vocabulary for it recently, Emilie Baltz says.

''Food design is new everywhere and part of the challenge right now is nobody has a real definition of what food design is. I hope there never is a firm definition. That would be quite boring,'' she said.

Boring is not something this French-American designer does.

Having trained in screenwriting and photography but finding film-making not immediate enough, she thought she might try interior decoration but the beige studios at the Pratt Institute in New York depressed her.

She took the lift to the wrong floor and discovered herself in the industrial design department.

They were making boots that could go to the moon, hairdriers that could fly - it was truly a place of invention, she said.

With a French mother who cooked in the French way, Baltz grew up realising her family life was different from that of her friends living in the Midwest.

''Food was a really fundamental part of my personal identity that also began to illustrate how important its repercussions are to cultural identity,'' she said.

She did not want to be a chef although she describes herself as a keen amateur cook. She wanted a broader palette for her creativity, to be able to experiment, to be involved in community and social interaction, to have space for play and storytelling and to be able to use her hands, she said.

There was not a market for food design when she graduated in 2005, but she knew that was what she wanted to do.

Feeling dehumanised by designing products on-screen, she started to make strange little snacks from office junk food such as Twinkies, Triscuits and Cheez Whiz.

''I would make up these gourmet concoctions looking at the materials at hand, the same kind of thing my mother had done as an immigrant in a foreign land. Here I was in my land still feeling like an immigrant,'' she said.

''They really were experiments: what does this material do? I poke it, I look at it, I make this and I taste it: ooh that was good; ooh that was bad. What I was doing was food design.''

A colleague put her creations on a website which led to a book offer and her first book, Junk Foodie: 51 Delicious Recipes for the Lowbrow Gourmand, was published in 2010.

At the time, the recession had hit New York and restaurants had closed, but that led to other opportunities.

The empty spaces had to be reimagined and were ripe for creativity and for artists and chefs to envision what the city could become, she said.

''This is a key role that design plays. Design is not just an object or colour or graphic. It's how you reorganise a system to make it better.

''That's where food started to play an important role: the phenomenon of pop-up restaurants, food trucks became better than ever because they were cheap and available on the street.

''The city embraced that and it became a hotbed of interest because people didn't have the budget to go out to these huge fancy restaurants any more, so the supper club started - chefs who had lost their jobs would open their homes to invite people in.''

She and three colleagues, a chef, composer and an interior designer, opened What Happens When, a pop-up restaurant in an abandoned restaurant space.

The idea was to look beyond the kitchen and the plate and imagine what a restaurant could be if design drove the food rather than the chef and the menu.

Every 30 days they changed the theme, design and food.

One of her favourites was inspired by the children's picture book, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.

They created an abstract children's fantasy forest in the black-painted space with lengths of wood painted teal, bits of moss, birds, animal tracks that ran across the floor and sometimes over tables, and little hidden surprises, she said.

The chef would listen to what the space was going to be like and figure out what his counterpoint would be to it.

The food included nuggets of deep-fried frogs' legs, fillets of trout, venison and gem-coloured vegetables like purple potatoes.

The soundtrack was like a pop jungle, she said.

''It was a question of how can we make this not literal but a representation, and balance it so it has a human hand in it.''

Since then she has curated Play, the bar at the Museum of Sex, in New York.

After the mental and visual stimulation of visiting the museum, it was to offer physical stimulation without going into the pornographic, she said.

''So we are stimulating the senses and looking at sexuality which is very basic and very human, but culturally in the United States it's not a conversation that's had a lot and not a lot of permission to even experience.''

''It's not the pornography side that's of interest but the ability to understand ourselves as humans, so the bar was conceived as a place to be able to play with that and say how do we smell, how do we lick, how do we bite, how do we suck, all things we do naturally with food and we also do them in sex. They are all primal places in our being and there's nothing wrong with that, so let's make it something that's fun and celebratory.''

She worked with 15 chefs and mixologists from around the world to create food and cocktails inspired by the emotion of love, which she recorded in L.O.V.E. Foodbook, winner of Best First Cookbook at the Prix Gourmand 2013.

One of them was the cocktail Pareidoilia, a term for recognising images in clouds or messages in music: what you see is not what you get, she said.

The cocktail, created with Dutch artist Bart Hess, was a white goo served on a black plate with a ribbed bottom.

It was flavoured with ouzo and nigorizake so it had an Eastern flavour, exotic to a Western palate and the guest had to lick it.

''As you run your tongue over the ribbed plate, you are licking this totally exotic thing so the flavours are going to a place like 'I don't know where I am' and your tongue is [vibrating] and when you look around the room everyone is licking.

"People are giving themselves permission to use their bodies and the codes of eating are gone.''

Our mouths are our primary sensory point of entry into the world - children put everything in their mouths - but as adults we forget a lot of that, she says.

She describes her projects as holistic experiences because they are dealing immediately with all the senses: taste, smell, touch, sound and sight.

''Experiential'' is a food trend that's big at the moment and ''sensorial'', pertaining to the senses, is already happening, but more will become aware of its power.

Another coming trend is neurogastronomy, looking at the effect of food on our behaviour and what this does to our brain that ties up with nutrition and wellness, she says.

When we eat we create patterns of behaviour, not only affected by our calorie intake but by other things such as how we sit, slumped or alert, whether we are holding a mug of coffee in a fist that without the mug could punch someone, or holding a teacup daintily.

''All those are cues our body is taking in every time we enact this and they have direct behavioural consequences, so design, I think, and food design ultimately understands behaviour and takes it into account.''

The practice of design is a systems approach to problem-solving so it requires one to look outside oneself, do research, understand the end user, production, delivery and placement.

It happens at different scales from a plate in a restaurant to a global oil supply.

They are all design systems and it's become a buzzword because it's in response to a need as well, she said.

At home you can also use food design, even in how you frame your meals.

Do you think of meals in terms of meat, starch and vegetables?

''What if, instead of making your shopping list in the food categories, what if you looked at it through colour?

"We all know we have to eat more colours to be healthy, so a simple way to redesign your approach to food could be to think my shopping list could be about trying to create this beautiful colour palette instead.''

Food can also be used to tell stories.

When she was a child, Sunday night was pizza night and they made their own pizzas - a triangular pizza like an Egyptian pyramid and olives lined up as pharaohs or soldiers, she said.

''I think at heart food design is anything that improves our relationship to food so if that means improving the fun we have with it, great.

"If it means improving the efficiency we have with it, amazing. It may also mean improving the health around it or the distribution system or the politics around it.''

Food design can range from the latest molecular gastronomy of Feran Adria or Heston Blumenthal, who push the boundaries of what you can do with food, redesigning our relationship with a carrot or tomato, to McDonalds, one of the most intricate food designs created for speed, to things like looking at insects as a new, sustainable source of protein or genetically modifying vegetables, she said.

''I think that design at heart also is a quest for the beautiful and that beauty is an ability to create resolved relations and this means it can exist in anything from a vase to a system of distribution.

"If all the pieces fit in the right place that thing works beautifully, so simple. That for me has always been a definition of beauty.''

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