Marije: Whatever I make, it's always experienceable. That's why it's so hard to exhibit it, because I don't want to make something that people just look at. I want to make something that people can interact with, or taste, or put in their bodies, or to really do something with. And I think because you—it needs to be touching you in a way. It needs to really… you need to be able to feel it.
I'm Marije Vogelzang and I'm an Eating Designer.
I'm trained as a product designer, so I'm supposed to make objects. I mean originally I would, but then I started to work with food. And I started doing that about 18 years ago and then people didn't know about food and design. So they started telling me that I was a food designer, which sounds really nice, but that doesn't really make sense because I don't really design food.
I think food is already perfectly designed by nature, so I try to design from the act of eating. So it's about food production, about rituals of food; it's about food and communication, it’s about food and culture, it's about the effect that consumerism has on the planet. It's a very broad theme and I think that's much more interesting.
I think designers working with food, they should be a good designer at first. But then they should also be able to make this kind of, unexpected design twist. To come up with something new that could potentially lead to a new culture or that could potentially lead to a new consumption pattern or to a new behaviour. So that’s the nice thing about culture.
That’s why as a designer I really like to work on the cultural side. Because you can influence culture. Culture is never static. It changes everyday. That's why I like food culture, because food culture changes everyday, and is being recreated every day.
Marije:"Volumes" is an idea to have a kind of design approach to behavioural science. Brian Wansink did a lot of studies on how people behave and perceive food, and one of the things that he wrote was, we eat what we have on our plates so we are kind of trained to just empty [our] plate and our eyes can't really grasp how much is on that plate. So if it's a deep bowl, it would be perceived [as] the same amount of food as on a flat plate, for example. And I was fascinated by this very, very simple idea that we actually have no idea how much we eat.
So I was thinking to make these objects that you can put on your plate. Because if you put an object with your food on your plate, then first of all it will fill the plate partly. So you can’t put food there, but visually it seems as if the plate is full. But if you have that object you can also put other food items on it and you can work on food styling. It is true that when plates are well-styled then people will eat with more care and attention. And if you eat your food with more attention, you will also eat slower and you will also feel filled quicker.
That was the basic idea, so I started to make shapes—these are just prototypes—that’s a first phase of a longer project. These are silicon-covered stones, and now I’m going to make the next step, working with ceramics and 3D printing and working with different kinds of glazing for this.
There's been a lot of debate about the aesthetical part of this. We were actually having lunch a lot and I was putting cups in between our food. We were just playing with the idea of having something in your food and it's nice, actually, to push it around on your plate with your spoon, so it's also important what material it's made of.
Because there's a sound, and there's a feeling when you have a spoon and you touch an object on your plate. And then we started to think like what could it be and how would we make it and then I was thinking like, “Rocks are actually really nice.” Because these are just found rocks, because I didn't really want to make a new thing because rocks are already there and I like that every one of them is different.
So I wanted to find this specific place on the border on what is crazy and what is not. And sometimes they have things sticking out of them just like a tree would have little growing things out of them. And then you can place maybe a strawberry on top of it. It has a lot of potential to play with and to put your own imagination around.
For now, this served me a good purpose to get them online and get the reactions and have a good laugh about all the vomiting people that are really appalled by this idea. Isn't it strange that we have such a sensitive emotion when it comes to these objects? And why don't we have it towards the actual food that we do eat, which is full of chemicals, full of additions that we might not even want? It is a metaphor for many things within our life. How we have this distant feeling to not only food but a lot of the simple things or the basic things in life.
I'm very bored by the whole Pinterest, Instagram aesthetic that you see. Of course I can make nice, ceramic, smooth objects that you put between your food and everybody is happy and it's really nice. But I was much more interested to make something that is awkward, that makes you think and really makes you look at it.
And I'm not making them to necessarily to be mass produced and to sell them. But what I really want to do is to have this attention and then having people copying me. So just to inspire people to change their eating behaviour. That is what I want to do. I don’t necessarily want to design objects.
Marije:The more I know about food the more I get scared sometimes, about the future, because there's a lot going on. And you can see that it's so dependent on so many influences, politically and culturally and also economically. So then I can't really see that future very clearly. On the other hand if you're positive and you see all the potential that can be developed and that's already there, then I can envision a really positive food culture, a future
Because I think the world also just needs creative minds working in food, because if we continue the way we deal with food like we do now, then we won't have any food in the future. So we have to do something with that. So I'm not saying that food designers working with food are going to solve it all, but I do think they will help it.