Design – Page 4 – The Hungry Philosopher

Food, Color and Happiness

May 21, 2014Leave a comment

Truck Image from: http://www.saglobalaffairs.com/features/1445-a-moving-riot-of-color.html

A blogger from Tasmania, Australia, Harry wrote an entry entitled The Happiest City in the World that referred to Rajshahi, Bangladesh, voted the happiest city on earth by the World Happiness Survey in 2006. What accounts for the happiness in such a difficult social, political and economic context? He asked. His blog entry was again published in The Bangladesh Reader (Duke, 2013) for its vivid description of his dinner and travel experience in Bangladesh. For me, hungryphil, the association of dinner and colorful trucks with general happiness supports my suspicion regarding the inherent sociality and creativity of consumption, both food and design. Here is an excerpt from Harry’s blog: http://www.agentleplace.com/the-happiest-city-in-the-world-2/:

Dinner last night, had at Aristocrat roadhouse halfway between Rajshahi and Dhaka, was a perfect illustration of this. After my favourite Bangladeshi meal, dhal makhani, was served I watched as each of my Bangladeshi colleagues served each other before serving themselves and, having noticed the plate of the person next to them emptying, stopped eating mid-mouthful to add yet more naan to their culinary neighbour’s plate. Such displays of caring and gentleness cycled around the table throughout the meal, naturally amongst the customary pleas of ‘No, no, that’s too much.’ But it would be rude to deny the friendship and, after approaching proficiency in eating with my hands (right hand puckered into the shape of a badminton shuttlecock as it gathers up the food and elephant trunks it into your mouth; left hand avoiding direct food contact but used to spoon yet more dhal onto your plate and the plates of those around you) we rolled down the ornate Aristocrat stairs and into the waiting minibus. It was time to see more of Bangladeshi’s colour, and the road was as good a place as any to observe it.

Bangladeshi trucks must be of the most colorful in the world. With a framing coat of canary yellow, each panel is painted with utopian scenes of snow-capped mountains, meandering rivers, enchanted forests and fairytale palaces; verdant greens, royal blues, crimson reds and burnt oranges. No pastel shades for vibrant Bangladesh. Even the central hub of the rear differential is painted, usually mimicking that of half a large soccer ball. Whereas the trucks are simply glaringly colourful, the passenger rickshaws are both colorful and ornate. Gold, silver and bronze are added, as is the standard shocking pink. The flat-tray rickshaws don’t escape colour either: the slatted sides are painted in alternating blocks of yellow, red, blue, green and orange. Even the twin-light Victorian-style Rajshahi lampposts get the colour treatment with one bulb shining pink, the adjacent one green.

I wonder how I might conduct a study that attempts to find correlations between food sharing, use of color and happiness. In a land of poverty, sharing transforms into a self-negating and revolutionary act. The performance of serving and attending to fellow diners is both an obligation and right of the host. One always offers to fill up another’s plate. If only this sentiment translated into all our actions. Similarly, the brightly decorated trucks attempt to ameliorate the confusion of Bangladeshi roads and aggressive driving. As if the well dressed deserves the right of way. Hmmm. Color masks and highlights the threat of the Bangladeshi roads, just as dinner gestures of sharing masks and highlights scarcity. Is this another expression of what Dan Gilbert names synthetic happiness? The willful construction of joy. Synthetic happiness, Glibert argues is as potent as the natural happiness we experience when we get what we want. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy

Could it be that food and design are both activities of synthetic happiness through which we fabricate shared joy despite our human condition? Is that the lesson of the World Happiness Survey?

Learning (and Eating) from Las Vegas

May 19, 2014Leave a comment

Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi and Dennis Scott Brown, published 1977, was a postmodern call to celebrate the vernacular and everyday. The images of the strip bustling with billboards and signs challenged the way architects thought about the formal role of commercial and public buildings. The architects, Venturi and Brown, argued against modernist “holier than thou” purist abstraction and suggested that the Vegas strip satisfied a collective emotional longing for the imagined American main street. The post-modern architectural manifesto venerated buildings that spoke volumes through billboards and bright signs of human lust, gluttony and greed. Building that spoke of the messy reality of life instead of an idealized vision projected on a drafting table.

One might argue that today Las Vegas is anything but common and everyday and has lost its 1970s main street appeal. Sure the scale and brightness of the signs have grown to fantastic proportions yet the content is the same: gambling, entertainment and food.

Yes, FOOD.

The extravagance of Las Vegas buffets has long been legendary. My recent visit to The Bacchanal at Ceasar’s Palace certainly supports it’s fame by boasting over 500 international dishes. I felt both dizzy with the seemingly infinite choices and doomed in my incapacity to enjoy all of it. An existential crisis of sorts looking into the cauldron of infinite gastronomical choices. The scripted labels announcing each dish to the diner mimicked the billboards outside. The buffet is an easy architectural translation of gastronomic and aesthetic choice where individual preference has priority over collective good (for example: a school cafeteria lunch). The Bacchanal was NO school cafeteria.

I was surprised how deliberately and unrelentingly celebrity chefs and their restaurants were promoted. Indeed, food tourism has taken a very strong cross media hold in Las Vegas. As an avid Food Network, Cooking Channel viewer I was both soothed by the familiar and overwhelmed by the dominance of personality over food. Are we witnessing the rise of popular haute cuisine as inaccessibly expensive exercises of vanity and commerce or is it a sign of innovative gastronomic experiments? I imagine a bit of both, but how do I decipher the difference? First of all, I can’t afford the $$$$ Yelp range, so that takes care of that dilemma. Even so, there still remains much to choose from.

The privilege of individual preference particularly in Las Vegas makes my experience limited and almost too particular to be worth rational judgment. So, the following is not a review but merely an account of three meals touched by television celebrity. Were my expectations different? Did my food taste different? Did the “chef-signature” affect the quality of the experience? In the buffet of signs, architectural and gastronomic, how do we make a choice?

Yelp did not help me in this overwhelming situation where the quality is generally equivalent. Reviews only matter if you know what you personally like. Maybe I like standard overpriced well cooked steak and potatoes, maybe my feet are tired and despite mixed reviews and warnings of bad service, I’ll eat anything. Maybe I’m lost and I can’t find the four star rated restaurant and instead I have to settle for something else that turns out to be fantastic……………sometimes the uncertainty is too great for the collective might of Yelp. As it should be.

Pastry Chef Jean-Philippe Patisserie at the Bellagio

http://www.jpchocolates.com/

Boasts the world largest chocolate fountain. The choice to visit was easy. Did not know much about the chef and consequently did not have specific expectations. Had breakfast of an Almond Brioche. The bread was a beautifully toasted platform for the slightly sweet almond cream with roasted and crunchy almond flakes. It was delicate and substantive, creamy and crunchy, sweet and slightly salty from the almonds. It was early enough, without a crowd, to eat and enjoy the view of the chocolate fountain. The small and intimate scale of the space heightened the glistening and precious sweets beckoning beyond the glass cases. Next time, I’ll have to have something chocolate. In context, the chocolate fountain made sense and was not a mere publicity stunt. The chocolate fountain summoned us like a religious relic and we as pilgrims rejoiced at the sight and taste. The pastries were quite literally and visually the centerpiece of the establishment (not the personality of the pastry chef). I appreciate the obvious love of crafted sweets that converts indulgence into an art form.

Table 10 Chef Emeril Lagasse at the Palazzo

http://www.emerilsrestaurants.com/table-10

We were tired from walking in the sun and looking for a break around three in the afternoon. Table Ten was a lucky surprise. My sister and I shared the little lobster rolls. Our meal was too small and tame to justify the big personality of BAM! Emeril Lagasse. I can’t fault him for my sense of being underwhelmed. The décor that included multiple chef coats, Emeril spice mixes, cooking tools, alongside the open kitchen highlighted the celebrity chef appeal of the restaurant. The familiar taste of the lobster roll was amplified by a touch of celebrity vanity. Maybe the Lagasse signature convinced me that it was better than it was. Served the same thing anywhere else, my response would be “ Wow! this is very good” instead of “this very good and of course it should be.” Did my high expectations weaken my experience? Does more information enhance or diminish the taste? Like knowing how something is made or who made it?

China Poblano at the Cosmopolitan by Chef Jose Andres

http://www.chinapoblano.com/

Intrigued by the hybrid concept, I hoped and planned for visiting China Poblano. Visually the restaurant maintains the duality by splitting the space into the China side with a dumpling-making area and the Mexico side with a taco-making area. Visitors seated at the “bar” that winds across both work stations can watch the busy construction of dumplings and tacos as they eat. The walls are decorated with masks and large prints depicting both cultures. The restaurant boasts a 40-40-20 split, whereby, each culture is represented 40% and 20% of the dishes represent a “marriage,” not a fusion, of flavors (this according to the hotel publicity channel). Owing to the dual theme (and being already very full from our visit to Table 10) we ordered the guacamole that was being made in front of us at the “bar,” salsa and chips and the beef watermelon radish suimai. Our order reflected the combination of cultures and as well as a combination of familiar and unfamiliar tastes. The beef suimai was new and unfamiliar, tasted like an exotic lemongrass flavored barbacoa wrapped in a dumpling noodle. Experimentation, playfulness, excitement infused the food and the environment. It is an appropriate restaurant for The Cosmopolitan. The theatricality of the space and food production was a happy surprise. It was a learning experience: of how the familiar can feel strange like fantastically fresh guacamole in warm corn tortillas and conversely, how the strange can feel familiar like beef suimai. The tastes were beyond judgments of good or bad: I don’t know if I “liked” the suimai. BUT…it certainly was interesting and thought provoking. To me, a philosopher, that’s worth it. I had also been to Jaleo, same chef but with a very different vibe (Spanish tapas), in D.C with my daughter for her birthday. The menu, atmosphere, food, wait staff, open kitchens everything about China Poblano conveyed its legend of a kidnapped Asian girl taken on a long voyage to Mexico. It makes me wonder about other possible legends, a Bengali in Bolivia? My visit to China Poblano was certainly a trip!

Bobby Flay’s Burger Palace was on my wish list. I appreciate the bright open welcoming design of the restaurant. The menu is visible from the street as are diners enjoying the fare. Again, much like the many restaurants in Las Vegas with open kitchens and dining rooms, eating is a spectacle at the Burger Palace. Alas, I had no room to take in the show.

The spectacle of food raised to level of theatrical entertainment competes for our attention and money. Images of the Cake Boss, Giada, Bobby Flay are displayed alongside the Beatles, The Blue Man Group, Cirque de Soleil, magic shows and adult entertainment. The visual and the gastronomic are now combined as the theatrical experience of Las Vegas hyperreality. This is not the era of static billboards but giant dynamic video screens. Celebrity chefs perform online, on T.V and through the fantasy of their restaurants. What I learned through visiting these three establishments is their vision as displayed and interpreted by designers and their taste as performed and imitated by local culinary talent. It’s a production like any other.

So, does the “signature-chef” experience affect the quality of the experience? Like all good philosophical questions the answer is both: yes and no.

For me (quality level being generally equal) the answer depended mostly on my expectation and my physical state (hungry, tired). How do you decide where to go, what to eat and how much you enjoyed the experience? In the buffet of restaurants what is your criteria? What LOOKS good to you?

It seems, there is still a lot to learn from Las Vegas both visually and gastronomically.

Pondering Brillat-Savarin’s Portait of a Pretty Gourmande

May 12, 2014May 12, 2014Leave a comment

Those of us, who may have over-indulged on Mother’s Day Brunch, may find consolation in transcendental gastronomy. Very roughly summarized and perhaps twisted: women who eat are pretty and wrinkle free (although I don’t think 18th Century French secret food writer Brillat-Savarin would approve of either a buffet or the indulgence it fosters). Nevertheless, I think he offers something to think about against the contemporary valorization of thin.

Brillat-Savarin’s meditations The Physiology of Taste (first published 1826) is full of fascinating observations about food in its fullest sense. The encyclopedic account of all things related to eating covers definitions (or rather meditations) of senses, taste, gastronomic sciences, appetite, specific food items like chocolate, sugar, truffles and fish (and their associated erotic properties), methods of cooking such as frying, thirst and drinks, obesity, cooking, illness ….and so on.

Meditation 11: On Gourmandism describes the pretty gourmande as follows:

Nothing is more agreeable to look at than a pretty gourmande in full battle dress: her napkin is tucked in most sensibly; one of her hands lies on the table; the other carries elegantly carved little morsels to her mouth, or perhaps a partridge wing on which she nibbles; her eyes shine, her lips are soft and moist, her conversation is pleasant, and all her gestures are full of grace; she does not hide that vein of coquetry women show in everything they do. With so much in her favor, she is utterly irresistible, and Cato the Censor himself would be moved by her.

…..ladies who know how to eat are comparatively ten years younger than those to whom this science is a stranger.

Brillat-Savarin continues his description of sensuality as both physical and gastronomic in his account of “Sensual Predestination”:

People predestined to gourmandism are in general of medium height; they have round or square faces, bright eyes, small foreheads, short noses, full lips and rounded chins. The women so predisposed are plump, more likely to be pretty than beautiful, and have a tendency toward corpulence. The ones who are most fond of tidbits and delicacies are finer featured, with a daintier air; they are more attractive and above all are distinguished by a way of speaking which is all their own.

It is by these outer traits that the most agreeable dinner companions must be judged and chosen: they accept everything that is served them, eat slowly, and enjoy reflectively what they have swallowed.

I doubt if Savarin’s physiological theory that people with “a general air of elongation” do not enjoy food. Even so, his coupling of the visual and the gastronomic could offer a clue to our current fascination with thin. Does minimalist modern design feed into the aesthetic and gastronomic sensibility of “thin”? Can we study design eras in relation to celebrated body types? I digress……

Happy Belated Mother’s Day to all those agreeable, pleasant, plump and pretty gourmandes everywhere. Hope you enjoyed your brunch buffet!

“Food is often …

April 4, 2014May 6, 20146 Comments

“Food is often the way to “knock” and engage a community. We all bring wine or a dish to thank friends or family for hosting. We eat with new friends to ritualize and legitimize our engagement, even if we don’t really like the particular dishes.”

This quote comes from Bruce Nussbaum’s book “Creative Intelligence” in reference to culturally responsive design strategies. After describing his first necessary taste of Monkey Brains…..yes, monkey brains in the Philippines, as a Peace Corps volunteer, he talks about how Lenovo reached a rural audience and marketed their computers better than HP and Dell. Here’s how Nussbaum explains the strategy of “knocking,”

“According to Fast Company, in rural China, people frequently buy PCs as wedding gifts. A computer purchase is not merely a market transaction, based on price; it’s a gift that provides the foundation for a lifetime of social interactions between two families. So the box, the packaging, the entire presentation, is crucial. By making the box representative of the gift it contained, Lenovo was able to capture more of the rural market than HP — a knock worth hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.”

Food as social and commercial strategy emphasizes and validates culturally shared experiences, even if different from our own cultures. The theatrical performance of the Lenovo box as a component of a wedding ritual conveys cultural respect, just as eating monkey brains. It may or may not influence our own tastes or meaning. I don’t think Nussbauam eats monkey brains habitually now. The gesture is enough. One does not need to like monkey brains in order to connect with those who do. But…….one has to at least try it, once. In the case of Lenovo….it wasn’t even the meal but the platter that made all the difference. So much of what designers do involves the aesthetic (articulate and material) presentation of constructed meaning. Food helps us practice the skill of human generosity. Makes me want to host a party! Would paper plates imply disrespect? Maybe not the well designed ones…….

Seinfeld’s Forks are Funny

March 3, 2014Leave a comment

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jan/05/jerry-seinfeld-funny-sex-swearing-sitcom-comedy

Seinfeld’s comment that forks are funny and salt shakers are not remind us of the simple reality that things, no matter how small or mundane, have agency. Objects compel us, move us, make us think, laugh, feel. Of course, someone could dispute his comment and insist that salt shakers are funnier than forks. But, that’s not the point. Forks, spoons, or salt shakers, there is inspiration everywhere. Seinfeld’s comment is consistent with his insight that: When someone does a small task beautifully, their whole environment is affected by it.

The Futurist “Declaration of Love Dinner”

February 5, 2014February 5, 2014Leave a comment

The Italian movement, founded by Thomas Marinetti, rightly and wrongly associated with fascism cultivated a modern mythology of speed. In his 1909 Futurist Manifesto, he charts a violent, energetic movement that sings “the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.” http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html

Here is an excerpt from the 1931 Futurist Cookbook that felt appropriate for upcoming Valentine’s Day. It makes us ask, what is the taste of love and desire? And, by extension……..What would my 2014 menu show? I’ll have to think about this one and get back to you.

I desire you: antipasto composed of a myriad selection of exquisite tid-bits, which the waiter will only let them admire, while She contents herself with bread and butter.

Flesh Adored: A big plate made from a shining mirror. In the centre, chicken slices perfumed with amber and covered with a thin layer of cherry jam. She while eating, will admire her reflection in the plate.

This is How I’ll Love You: Little tubes of pastry filled with many different flavours, one of plums, one of apples cooked in rum, one of potatoes drenched in cognac, one of sweet rice, etc. She, without batting an eyelid, will eat them all.

Super Passion: A very compact cake of sweet pastry with small cavities on the top filled with anise, glacier mints, rum, juniper and Amaro.

Tonight With Me: A very ripe orange enclosed in a large hollowed-out sweet pepper, embedded in a thick zabaglione flavoured with juniper and salted with little bits of oyster and drops of sea water.

Raymond Loewy on Burgers versus Creamy Chicken

January 30, 2014January 30, 20143 Comments

In his 1951 autobiography, Never Leave Well Enough Alone, French-born American Industrial Designer, Raymond Loewy devotes a chapter on “American Cooking” and gives food a pivotal role in the development of his design aesthetic. The analogy between food consumption and product consumption arises out a shared response to taste. Loewy presents himself as the harbinger of modern taste in food and products. In order to promote ‘industrial’ and simple, he negates the ‘domestic’ and the decorative, through gender differentiation. He writes,

“It seems to me that the American Woman may be partly responsible for the blandness discussed above. I’ve noticed that about the best food in America is not found in the tearoom shoppe, but at the truck driver’s joints, near plants at workmen’s eat shops, or Second Avenue bars and grills. There, you can always get a wholesome hamburger or some nice juicy pork chops with plenty of hot cottage fries, a hefty chunk (not a thin, patrician slice) of corned beef with real honest to goodness cabbage, and a glass of cool beer. I believe that if men were left alone they would soon demand real he-man’s bread, not the sissified stuff that looks as if it were daintily made by some arty and desiccated spinster at Ye Olde Tea Roome Shoppe.”

“Okay, sister, you win. Bring on the pink candle and the lace paper doily.”

His blame of ‘bland’ ascribed to women, separates the domestic and decorative from the mobile, industrial masculine world of diners. According to Loewy, the best food happens on the road or near industrial plants, where men consume unadorned, unadulterated, ‘wholesome’ food. The menu he describes of hamburgers, chops, corned beef and beer consists primarily of meat without accompaniment. The association of diners and diner food with masculinity, continues today in shows like ‘Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.’ The 1930-40s diners were exemplars of modern life that served mobility, urbanity, simplicity, mass production, mechanical production, masculinity, efficiency and reliability that Loewy hoped to spread.

By way of concluding the chapter and continuing on his gender differentiation, Loewy continues, “Another surprising American culinary phenomenon is the Home Economist. These dangerous creatures try to keep the bored and frustrated hausfrau from falling into the hands of a psychoanalyst (which they couldn’t afford anyhow) by keeping them busy in the kitchen. The formula is a blend of poetry, art and cookery. It gives the repressed, romantic mamma a chance to express her social amenities and relieve her libido through refuge in Arts and Cookies. A typical example of the home economist recipe ordinarily calls for an electric mixer and it runs something like this:……..” Here he inserts a recipe in the form of a poem. His first accusation against American women involves, pink paper doilies, dainty decorations and superfluous details. His second accusation, involves the misuse of technology. Whereby the use of blender is followed by attention to presentation details. The use of machines, scientific attention to food by the home economist lacks, according to Loewy, simplicity and honesty. Loewy accused the house wife of ‘busy work’ using the decorative to mine meaning, whether by habit or intention. The desiccated spinster and the hausfrau in need of psychoanalysis represent obstructions to modern progress. They are guilty of sauces that cover and garnishes that distract. He would not appreciate food network shows like‘Semi Home Made’ that promote presentation.

Loewy’s autobiography is full of such anecdotes and opinions about food aim to direct modern consumption habits. More on Loewy later……..

[excerpt from conference presentation for “Food Networks: Gender and Foodways” University of Notre Dame, 2012]

Apples and Carrots

January 30, 2014January 30, 2014Leave a comment

Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs brings up set of gastronomic idiosyncrasies. In the third chapter, “The Dropout,” Isaacson describes Jobs’s fascination with vegetarianism and Zen Buddhism in 1972. According to Isaacson, Jobs at the time was influenced by Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé and Mucusless Diet Healing Systems by Arnold Ehret. These books encouraged Jobs to assume a diet of simple fruits and starch-less vegetables. Soon, Jobs became obsessed with limiting weeklong diets to single items, such as apples or carrots, either of which he would eat exclusively for a whole week. In doing so, Jobs eliminated milk and carbohydrates that increased the risk of harmful mucus. Referring to Jobs’s carrot diet, Isaacson mentions that, “Friends remember him [Jobs] having, at times, a sunset-like orange hue.”[1] Jobs would also fast from two to seven days at a time, after which “you start to feel fantastic,” according to Jobs: “You get a ton of vitality from not having to digest all this food. I was in great shape. I felt I could get up and walk to San Francisco anytime I wanted.”[1] In the entire biography, prepared food is mentioned twice: once in relation to his eating sushi with his daughter and secondly to his vegan wedding cake. These references to Jobs’s eating habits are by no means anecdotal; describing his return to Apple in 1997 and his obsession with translucent and colored plastic, Isaacson writes that “Jobs became infatuated with different materials the way he did with certain foods.”[1] Food as an indicator of a designer’s relationship with the non-human reveals much about design motivations. Jobs’s compulsion toward clean, simple shapes can be traced back to his demand for mucus-less diets of single fruits.

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