What’s on your plate isn’t just what is there on the plate.
The food we eat has a complete system around it, within it, before it – before it comes to your plate. And after it - when your payment triggers a chain of economic rewards to many who made the meal happen. Some you see, most you don’t.
Let’s picture it for a moment. Let’s say you have a plate of steaming Khichri (the warm and filling, ancient rice-based Indian dish that has salivating patrons across the world and variants all over South Asia and Europe).
The grains might have been grown by a family of four from a small local community out of a district in Uttar Pradesh. It might have made its long journey from the producer farms, through traders, wholesale, retail and so forth into possibly a home kitchen.
At the kitchen, a home-chef (bless all of them!), with her secret recipe, conjures up this amazing dish, mixing up the grains with other ingredients sourced from other producers, each ingredient having its own journey while making its way to the kitchen.
The chef’s pot is where they jostle, get spiced up and then if she is in an artistic mood, it gets arranged and then finally delivered to your table through a food delivery app. If you are lucky, the home-chef (again bless them all!) would have packed in a small bit-sized portion of a home-made pickle.
Let’s look at the visibles and the invisibles. The latter outnumber the former by miles. Food design helps making sense of both.
Visibles – the dish, the container, the visible ingredients in the dish, the app on which you made the discovery, the way the dish was presented, the delivery person, the payment formalities. And if you haven’t polished off the entire plate (and chances are remote), then the food waste.
Invisibles – the producer farms, the labour that went in, the community story, their culture, the journey of the ingredients, the distribution chain, the home-chef’s amazing recipe, the food culture she grew up with, the festivals where Khichri is the pride of plate, her influences, the ingredients that are handpicked, the food miles the ingredients travelled, and much much more.
These visibles and invisibles are what comprise the food system we are referring to.
Food Design is about the system design.
Design that starts with sustainable thinking and ends with Food.
How do we make a difference to the quality of life, both ours and that of all the players involved in this system through design intervention - micro-changes we can make, choices we make in purchase and consumption and being a bit more in love with just not what we eat, but what we don’t often see. The invisibles.
The immediate response people give when asked about ‘what is food design?’ is – “making the food on the plate look amazing or the art of plating dishes.”
Yes, it is one of the sub-disciplines of food design, but it is not the only one thing, what food design is. As we mentioned earlier, we need to look at the system. As consumers, food lovers, restaurant owners, producers and more. But probably as a consumer first – as that can trigger powerful change.
The interdisciplinary nature of Food Design brings together the subcategories of Design to provide solutions much beyond visual and experience design.
One of the basic needs for human beings to survive has always been food. Food cultures across the world are based on a composite of factors like geography, economics, sociology, climate as well as culture, politics and history. Biodiversity often shapes food habits of a population. Festivals and social gatherings are closely linked to the seasons and agricultural produce. Crop production is often influenced by either seasonal beliefs and practices or by commerce or by guiding state policies.
As we dig deeper and get to the roots of these food cultures, we realise that there is a complex interconnected food system beyond the farm to table, involving a number of stakeholders right from the production & distribution stages to the final consumption of food.
The background image is the Food System Categories map developed by The Common Table.
What is the system?
We. All of us.
We have old and new businesses and ventures catering to each and every component of this food system. Be it the agro-tech industry or the food delivery firms or a fast food chain, a slow-cooking home-chef, a fruit seller or a packaging firm or a hotel brand with its restaurants - all of them are the stakeholders in the food system. Because of its complexity, a lot of components are often broken or disconnected; or can be made better - and that is where food design jumps in.
‘FOOD DESIGN includes food product design, design for food, design with food, food experience design, food service design, food space design, food storytelling, food branding, food content and most importantly and critically, sustainable food design.’
The relationship of food and design has always been interconnected - design has been an agency in the food systems since the Anthropocene* started, but it is about time to recognize its value to reimagine a conscious and secure food system.
*The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth's history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet's climate and ecosystems.
Food Design cooks with a number of themes and practices which are elaborative sub categories by themselves like - Community, Heritage, Agriculture, Kitchen, Education, Agency, Speculations, and many more.
What are you willing to change? What’s your system?
The meaning of food design moulds itself depending on the field of design/design thinking periphery you hail from. A lot of food related businesses and ventures today lack the touch of food design. Steroid driven commerce and quick systems can erode and eat away at many precious things let alone quality that make food happen. While the sky is the limit and the earth is the depth to explore this realm, taking baby steps towards understanding its applications is significant.
If given a chance, Food Design has the capacity to solve for crucial issues like conservation of biodiversity, ensuring conscious consumption, democratising access to nutritious food, renewing the culture of food and communities, fair-policy making, food-supply security, booting up responsible ventures, innovating green arms for corporations, and the list goes on.
As we dive into the ocean of Food Design, we also deem it necessary to be backed up with research tools, tech-aid, impact driven values and domain experts with field knowledge. Collaborations between Food Designers and other stakeholders in the food chain can not only bring a wave of innovations, create experiences that are memorable and honest, but also strategically prepare businesses and ventures for the coming future.
Business and food design
Food investigation and research, along with Food Design can help food brands, food and service players, entrepreneurs, policy making bodies, hotels, hospitality brands, D2C brands, packaging firms, food apps, producers and consumers. It makes a difference to all of us. As a Venture Design house and immersed in exploring the business of design, we are looking at the capacity of food design as a practice to better, improve and reimagine the food system. We believe that this, much neglected and less discussed subject needs to be the centre of dining table conversations (and even working lunch chats in board rooms). The idea is for the system and its players not to be happy, just with table stakes.
After all, we are what we eat.
Venture with design thinking, imagination and technology.
As venture designers we are always rooting for brave and bold businesses and entrepreneurs who are embarking on new ventures and products, trying to solve a problem or thinking the new. The world has become better, simpler and more delightful owing to this brave, intrepid tribe of founders and innovators. And we need more of them. The world needs more of them.
Today for large corporate houses, and businesses, agility is the most valuable currency. If as a business you are not imagining the new or acting upon threats to your business, someone else will be conceiving ventures and ideas that will simply disrupt you out of the market.
Corporate venture development and co-creation with venture design labs can be a smarter and faster way to carve newer roads to growth and profitability. As also to out-think challengers.