Eating Design as a Social Bonding Tool
by Marije Vogelzang
Marije Vogelzang asks us very bluntly, do we really need food and design? Through her work she explores the potential impact food and design can have on people’s behaviors and interactions. Vogelzang believes it is through design that we are able to imagine what is not yet tangible, and through food we are connected to a larger structure of the world. A pioneer in the field of eating design, she is not really interested in designing food, and that “food is already perfectly designed by nature.” It is the verb “eating” that holds design potential for her. She reminds us that through the act of eating we are also shaping the agricultural landscape.
Her experimentation with designing eating experiences began at a time when it was not considered as formal design practice. In 2005, to her displeasure, she was asked to host a Christmas dinner by a design firm in Amsterdam, a work she would call Sharing Dinner. In order to avoid all the cliches of an already over designed experience, she decided to completely recreate the ritualistic elements of Christmas dinner.
Cascading a white cloth from the ceiling onto the table, she invites diners to enter the cloth, completely covered by this cloth. “Everyone is connected, so if you move, the sheet moves,” says Vogelzang. In Tokyo, she designed the same dinner, but with an audience that was much more reserved and formal at the start. It is through the opportunity of sharing, and making a mess, as a group, that the pressure and tension of having strangers at the same table is relieved. For Vogelzang, it was important to experiment with ways to make strangers connect, and communicate with each other more playfully.
Vogelzang believes the desired effect of an eating experience is very hard to determine, but it is through this kind of experimentation that we can understand what food can really do. Through Edible Memories she recreates old recipes from World War II in the Netherlands that elicited memories of a generation of citizens that had lived through the time. Food became a storytelling tool, which allowed people to communicate their memories and stories. “It is the ability of taste and smell to bypass the processing part of our brain that connects us to a very emotional side of ourself” says Vogelzang.
Teardrop is an installation made of rope and pipettes meant to encourage playful interaction between two people. The work came about from Vogelzang wanting to design an eating experience that could elicit childhood memories through childlike behaviors. Standing with your mouth open or being fed. In another attempt by Vogelzang to influence our behavior, Volume is a series of designed objects to curb our tendency to overeat. The objects once placed in our plate, gives our brain an accurate visual cue of how much we are actually consuming.
It is through our senses that we are able to connect with others. Vogelzang questions whether in our current eating experiences we are truly utilizing our senses. Taste, the way our mouth and tongue experience food, is the focus of the sensorial experience she creates in A Couple of Little Things. Through the isolation of all our other senses she attempts to detect the feelings eating can trigger. The experience left some feeling a sense of belonging and identity, while others left insecure.
In Grazing City Scapes she comments on how urban contexts have isolated us from the very tactile and sensory experiences of food. Vogelzang’s eating experience prompts us to use our lips, the most sensitive part of our bodies with over one million nerve endings, to graze food she has placed on pedestals.
Vogelzang's plethora of works reveal how much more we can learn from the act of eating. It is through her constant experimentation with the design of acts of eating that she reveals the potential food can have on fostering connections between people and unlocking memories, and emotions.
About the speaker
Marije Vogelzang is inspired by the origin of food, the etiquette, politics, history, and the culture of food. That is why she calls herself the first “eating-designer”. Her aim is to look at the context and background of food. Vogelzang works on restaurant concepts as well as designing art installations and curating exhibitions about eating and design.