Writer: Sraddha R
Editor: Ilakiya PB
Illustrator: Ananya Prabhakar
Food is a unique type of art. It has the power to stimulate all five of our senses. Visually appealing plating, the texture of the dish, the tantalizing aroma, the crisps, the crunch, and finally the taste of the dish significantly factor in when it comes to the overall presentation of a dish. Nevertheless, we are constantly interacting with food through sight alone in today's social media-driven, highly visual environment. The old aphorism ascribed to the first-century Roman gourmand Apicius, “We eat first with our eyes”, has never felt more accurate. If Roman patricians preferred to wow their visitors by presenting food in an ornate and elaborate manner to demonstrate their riches and prosperity, the digital age we live in has increased the significance of aesthetics in food drastically.
Facilitating foraging and feeding is one of the brain's primary functions. One of the brain's most vital processes is foraging. Foraging heavily relies on eyesight. Food and sight are so intimately related that trichromatic color vision may have evolved in primates as an adaptation to help them recognize colorful fruits amongst the dense, dark-green canopy. If visuals have been so important in the relationship we have with food, since time immemorial, then there has never been a time that has been so predominantly driven by the aesthetics of food as now.
We live in an era of aesthetic food photos and videos. Sometimes food is reduced to its visual appearance to the extent that a simple dessert with a gold leaf could make it much more expensive while the portion size of these kinds of dishes with an aesthetic upper hand is not satisfactory. We care so much about the way food is plated that we forget to appreciate what is being plated. Along with refining the art of plating and serving, some restaurants use unconventional strategies to encourage social sharing, such as offering Instagram kits with LED lighting, clip-on wide-angle lenses, selfie sticks, or printers that scan photos on the front of drinks.
The concept of "food plating" is based on the idea that people eat with their eyes first. Food plating is the art of arranging food on a plate in an attractive and visually pleasing manner. The presentation of food can make a dish more appealing and can even enhance its flavor and taste. A well-plated dish can make the food look more delicious, and can even make people want to eat more. Research has shown that the appearance of food can greatly affect the way we perceive taste.
A study conducted by the University of Oxford found that people rated the same food as tasting better when it was presented on a white plate than a black plate. Other studies by Zellner et al (2011), examined that the appearance of food on a plate affects how much people like the flavor of that food. Meals provided in a tidy manner are more favored than the same food presented in an untidy way and those who expect a tidy presentation are also willing to pay more as it indicates higher quality and care.
Whether it is caviar and gold leaf on top of an expensive dish or a layer of cream on top of butter chicken, there is no question that, we now, more than ever eat with our eyes. But with a little creativity and the aid of visual elements, we might be able to triumph over the challenges of food visualization in the digital age.
REFERENCES:
1. Spence, C., Piqueras-Fiszman, B., Michel, C. et al. Plating manifesto (II): the art and science of plating. Flavour 3, 4 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-3-4
2. Charles Spence, Katsunori Okajima, Adrian David Cheok, Olivia Petit, Charles Michel, Eating with our eyes: From visual hunger to digital satiation, Brain and Cognition, Volume 110, 2016
3. Piqueras-Fiszman, B., Giboreau, A. & Spence, C. Assessing the influence of the color of the plate on the perception of a complex food in a restaurant setting. Flavour 2, 24 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-2-24
4.Zellner, Debra & Siemers, Evan & Teran, Vincenzo & Conroy, Rebecca & Lankford, Mia & Agrafiotis, Alexis & Ambrose, Lisa & Locher, Paul. (2011). Neatness counts. How plating affects liking for the taste of food. Appetite. 57. 642-8. 10.1016/j.appet.2011.08.004.
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