What is food design?

What is food design?

Food design is the discipline that projects the experience of eating. Not only the food: also the object, the gesture, the space and the system around it. It designs the relationship between people and what they eat.

The short definition fits in a paragraph, but it is clearer through what it implies. Designing a spoon is deciding how much food enters each mouthful and how fast someone eats. Designing a package is deciding how much gets thrown away. Designing the order of a menu is deciding what gets remembered. None of that is cooking, and all of it shapes the experience more than the recipe does.

What food design is not

Three common confusions, worth undoing, because they are what make the term sound like everything and nothing.

It is not cooking. The cook works on the food; the food designer works on the system in which that food appears. They overlap often and collaborate well, but they are not the same job.

It is not food styling. Food styling prepares food to look good in a photograph. It is a difficult technical craft with its own value, but its goal is the image. The goal of food design is the experience. This confusion is frequent enough that it has its own page.

It is not event decoration. Setting a beautiful table is not projecting. The difference is whether there is a question behind it or only a visual result.

Where does food design come from?

Food has been an object of design forever, but the term is recent. In the late nineteen-nineties the Catalan designer Martí Guixé began using the food designer label for his own work, treating food as any other project material.

In parallel, in the Netherlands, Marije Vogelzang proposed an important shift: she does not design food, she designs the act of eating. She calls herself an eating designer, and that nuance moves the focus from the object to the experience.

From the academic side, Francesca Zampollo formalised food design thinking and founded the International Food Design Society, which gave the field a methodological frame and a shared vocabulary.

What is food design for?

It makes visible what eating hides. We eat several times a day without thinking, and inside that automatic gesture sit enormous decisions: where our food comes from, who produces it, what is wasted, what is celebrated and what is kept out of sight.

In its applied version it develops products, restaurant concepts, experiences and objects. In its critical version, which is where I work from, it raises uncomfortable questions about food systems using the same language those systems use: the table, the plate, abundance, scarcity.

What currents exist within food design?

Applied food design. Products, packaging, restaurant concepts, service formats. It answers a client brief.

Critical and speculative food design. Pieces that question the system rather than serve it. It lives closer to art, and it is where my own work sits.

Eating design. The Vogelzang line: what gets designed is the act, not the food.

Food design thinking. The academic and methodological branch that Zampollo formalised.

Chef-driven design. When the dish itself becomes the vehicle for the argument.

None is better than another. But mixing them up in conversation is what makes the term food design sound like everything and nothing.

Is food design the same as cooking?

No. Cooking turns ingredients into a dish. Food design projects the whole experience of eating: the food, but also the object, the gesture, the space and the system that make it possible. A cook resolves a plate; a food designer raises a question about why we eat the way we do.

Do you need to be a chef to work in food design?

No, and most food designers are not. They come from design, art, anthropology or engineering. What is needed is a project method and a point of view on what food means. Knowing how to cook helps, the way knowing how to draw helps an architect, but it is not the discipline.

Is food design a university degree?

Not yet as a degree of its own in most countries. It is studied inside design programmes, in master's degrees and in specialised tracks. Elisava in Barcelona, IED and several European schools offer specialised training.

How do food designers make a living?

From commissions for brands and restaurants, from research projects with institutions and universities, from teaching, and from their own work when the practice is artistic. Almost nobody lives on one of those alone.

Who invented the term food design?

There is no single inventor, but the Catalan designer Martí Guixé was among the first to use the food designer label for his own work, in the late nineteen-nineties. The Dutch designer Marije Vogelzang prefers eating designer, because for her what gets designed is not the food but the act of eating.