Food can be more than just sustenance; it can be art, a storytelling medium, part of our personal identity and part of our culture. Charmian Smith reports from the International Food Design Conference at Otago Polytechnic last week.
The International Food Design Conference held at Otago Polytechnic last week presented exciting new ways of looking at, and experiencing food: food as culture, as art, as a medium for storytelling or creativity or connectivity; food as a way of exploring or stimulating various senses, how the right music can enhance a wine; the history of fried chicken; even what happens to used coffee cups at the farmers market.
A message that came through in many presentations was that food was about connecting people, whether they were simply eating together as families and friends do, or whether they were collaborating to create a culinary work of art, foraging for wild food together or harvesting muttonbirds on the Titi islands with their whanau.
Food you grew up with can define who you are, as keynote speaker New York food designer Emilie Baltz said, and Ron Bull (Ngai Tahu) of Otago Polytechnic explained in a different way: if you don't share the food of those around you, you can feel like a foreigner.
Food can also communicate in sophisticated ways similar to conceptual artists' work, although it uses all the senses: taste, smell and touch, as well as sight and sound.
Food designers can manipulate the way we perceive or react to food, as Alexandra Sexton, a geography researcher from King's College London, explained in her presentation about meat cultured in a laboratory or farming edible insects, both forms of protein that will be needed to help feed the world sustainably in the future.
To overcome the ''yuk'' factor, the food has to be presented in a familiar way, with some details absented, just as is done at present with meat: we see animals and we see meat in marketing presentations, but we don't see the abattoirs or the seamier side of production.
Alistair Bolland, of Aoraki Polytechnic, revealed the history of fried chicken, its origins as slave food in the southern US through comfort food and local takeaways that connected communities to the global phenomenon of KFC.
Lee Pearce, from Bay of Plenty Polytechnic, explained how a sense of belonging is created for both customer and staff at one of the world's most revered restaurants, Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, United Kingdom.
Having spent three internships there, he also got conference participants to experience some simple techniques such as ''toasting'' marshmallows in liquid nitrogen so they are crisp but cold instead of hot, and instantly freezing mandarins in liquid carbon dioxide.
• One of the most fascinating workshops was Jo Burzynska's on how music can affect the perception of wine.
A sound artist as well as a wine writer, she pointed out that both sound and taste are powerful triggers of memory and some of the same language is used to describe them both, such as ''harmony'', ''notes'', ''tones'', ''brooding'', ''sweet'' and ''bitter''.
It's well known that music can evoke moods and feelings but new to me was that it can also alter the perception of how a wine smells and tastes.
Such cross-modal correspondences have been researched by Prof Charles Spence, of Oxford University, she said, but actually tasting the same wine with different pieces of music brought it home to me.
The tasters were in accord that the aromas, flavours and juiciness of sauvignon blanc was enhanced by Nouvelle Vague but dulled and hardened by Skeptics; that riesling was delicious with Vivaldi, pinot gris with John Fahey, and a nutty, oaky Hawkes Bay chardonnay harmonised with Nina Simone.
However, when it came to the reds, there was less agreement.
In general, she suggests fruity wines go with poppy music, tannic wines are enhanced by music with more bass and wines with high acidity by music of higher pitch; classical music and fine wine are good companions.
She says many bars and restaurants don't pay enough attention to the music they play.
Classical music makes people linger and spend more; slower music slows the traffic flow.
Wine and food often seem to have less flavour in aircraft, probably because of the white noise, she said.
She is involved with Auricle, a wine and sound bar attached to a sonic art gallery in New Regent St, Christchurch, which she believes is a world first.
She curates a wine list to go with each sonic art exhibition.
Her own work includes a residency in Irpinia, Italy in 2012 in which she created Oenosthesia, a multi-sensory installation made from recordings in the region's vineyards and wineries.
• Also pairing flavours and music was Gianpaolo Grazioli, of Giapo, his Auckland ice-creamery.
A scientist with a mission to create the world's best ice cream and a passion for experimenting, he hosted one of several evening culinary events during the conference, ''The dark side of dessert'', in which he presented three different desserts at Kiki Beware.
He loves playing with flavours and using unexpected ingredients and combinations.
One of the helpers was using tweezers to place individual calendula petals artistically around a ring of mandarin gel on plates lined up on the bench. Tall chocolate tart shells in the centre of each plate were having strawberry coulis and chocolate and Laphroaig ganache spooned into them.
The chef carefully placed a little forkful of squid ink spaghetti tossed in chocolate ganache into each tart, then it was topped with crunchy bits and a nasturtium petal, stray smears wiped from the plates, and served.
The savoury flavour of the spaghetti with the richness of the chocolate and slightly smoky whisky was a surprise but it contrasted with the sharpness of the mandarin gel. Matched with Led Zeppelin, it was an unexpected but intriguing dessert, but Gianpaolo had more surprises to come.
''Moodie vanilla'' came in a white chocolate cone decorated with a net of dried olives and topped with a thin disc of chocolate, textured like the full moon and dusted with silver and black - coal dust, he says.
Inside, the creamy filling tasted rather of vanilla, but was actually flavoured with olives, capsicum, star anise, pepper and cardamom to imitate vanilla, he said.
The third dessert, ''Danubio'', was a play on affogato and the most difficult to do because he wanted to stimulate all five senses, he said.
Part of the outside of the cup was crusted with slivers of toasted hazelnuts with a black sheen, and inside was his famous vanilla ice cream topped with espresso, froth and a generous sprinkling of biscuit crumbs also tossed in black and silver.
Strauss's Blue Danube waltz and a nip of Laphroaig accompanied it.
Storyteller extraordinaire Chloe Morris, from Edible Stories, in London, gave a keynote address and prepared the gala dinner with help from local culinary designer Liz Christensen and Richard Mitchell, of the polytech.
Her bimonthly public events in London interpret familiar stories like fairy tales in decor, food and music, although not literally.
In her Hansel and Gretel dinner there was no gingerbread house, but a filo pastry and sugar tower with gingerbread crumbs, nuts and apples, and she said she would never put a pumpkin on the table in Cinderella.
People don't know what the stories are, but are taken out of themselves for a few hours as they are immersed in the story, interacting with other diners, she said.
That's certainly what happened at the event on Friday evening, which told the story of the Sargood Centre, from its pre-European history as a Maori place of learning, through the 1925 New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition for which it was built, to its use as an art gallery and, more recently, as part of the polytechnic.
The event started at Manaaki, the polytech hospitality centre, with an outdoor feast of kai - muttonbird and weka on tortillas, cockle and other seafood cakes, parcels of duck cooked in the hangi, paua, kina and crayfish.
Then guests were transported by heritage bus to the Sargood Centre, where they were greeted by a carnival atmosphere: popcorn, quirky booths offering tins of beef stew and dumplings, scotch eggs, salmon, boxes of salad from disembodied hands and lamb chops from a cart.
A trick mirror and a cut-out flying machine, in which you could be photographed, added to the atmosphere.
We then walked down the outside of the building to the rarefied atmosphere of an art gallery with an ''exhibition'' of spoons attached to columns, each containing a cube of botanical gel, which you ate without using your hands.
In contrast, blue light, funky modern music and chefs freezing sprigs of mint in liquid nitrogen and shattering them over a reinterpretation of lemon tart represented the present.
Lemon tart was traditionally part of a chef's final training but this was deconstructed - lemon curd, passionfruit sago, tiny macarons, freeze-dried strawberry, pieces of aerated sponge that looked like little balls of fluff - and a citrus-injected huhu grub!
Guests returned to the exhibition room, now redecorated in after-party mode with popcorn on the floor and seats to collapse on, and slowly returned to the present.
We realised we'd been intrigued, well fed and entertained, that we'd interacted with other guests, acquired lasting memories, and been taken out of ourselves for a few hours, which is what Chloe Morris aims to do in her Edible Stories events.
The conference attracted more than 100 delegates from more than 10 countries, including the US, UK, Mexico, Nordic countries, Spain, Brazil, Austria, Italy, and, of course New Zealand.
