13. Back to the Futurists

Did you hear about the spat between Paul Pairet and Paco Roncero, two of the world’s top modernist chefs, whom we came across in “The Experiential Meal”? The former accused the latter of stealing his ideas around multisensory experience design. Both chefs currently deliver single-sitting multi-course tasting menus in futuristic dining spaces in which the projections on the walls and table change on a course-by-course basis to complement each of the dishes. Not only that but the music and soundscapes, even the ambient scent and temperature are all designed to match the food. On the surface at least, the chefs’ offerings are very similar. They both carefully control the atmosphere in order to deliver a truly multisensory dining experience. It is atmospherics taken to the max, facilitated by the latest in technology.

The question remains, though: who deserves the credit? Well, actually, I would say, neither of them do. In this, the final chapter, I want to put the case that as far as modernist cuisine is concerned, the Italian Futurists got there first. They may not have had the knowledge then to bring their dreams to life, at least not in a tasty way, but this is exactly what the science of gastrophysics is increasingly enabling some of the world’s top chefs—and eventually you at home—to do. It was the Futurists, after all, who were playing ambient soundscapes to complement the food they served, back in the 1930s; in their case, the sound of croaking frogs to accompany “Total Rice,” a dish of rice and beans, garnished with salami and frogs’ legs. Just think about it: Heston Blumenthal only started serving the “Sound of the Sea” seafood dish, the first multisensory attempt at the Michelin-starred level, back in 2007. And yet something very similar was taking place eighty years earlier, in Turin. No wonder, then, that some people have wanted to argue that the Futurists really were “Heston’s forerunner.”

Similarly, the recent interest of modernist chefs in miscoloring their foods or playing on the assumptions/expectations of the diner—be it Joan and Jordi Roca’s completely white dark chocolate sorbet or Blumenthal’s own “Beetroot and Orange Jelly” dish—is again pre-dated by the Futurists. These crazy Italians were deliberately miscoloring various familiar foods in order to discombobulate their dinner guests long before it became trendy for the modernist chef to do so. How would you feel about blue wine,* orange milk or red mineral water? Exactly! They were a dab hand too when it came to brightly colored cocktails.

The Futurists were interested in touch too, creating what may well be the first painting (entitled Sudan-Paris, 1920) designed to be stroked. They had their diners eat without the aid of cutlery, simply burrowing their faces in the plate at their restaurant, the Taverna del Santopalato (the Tavern of the Holy Palate), in Turin. And as we saw in the “Touch” chapter, it was also in Italy, eighty years ago, that the guests were instructed to stroke their neighbors’ pajamas, made of different materials, while dining.

The interest in fragrance, and in the delivery of food aromas in new and unusual ways, was also something that the Futurists experimented with, waiters spraying atomized perfume directly into the faces of their diners, for example. You find echoes of their exploits in today’s modernist food offerings. Chef Homaru Cantu described one of the dishes served at his restaurant Moto, in Chicago, thus: “This is my favorite part of the meal. I get to pepper-spray our guests.” This reminds me of: “Aerofood: A signature Futurist dish, with a strong tactile element. Pieces of olive, fennel, and kumquat are eaten with the right hand while the left hand caresses various swatches of sandpaper, velvet, and silk. At the same time, the diner is blasted with a giant fan (preferably an airplane propeller) and nimble waiters spray him with the scent of carnation, all to the strains of a Wagner opera.” How multisensory can you get? So, for anyone interested in disruptive multisensory design, a quick look back at the Futurists is perhaps the best place to start.

Just take the rise of “off the plate” dining and the increasing theatricalization of service that we came across in “The Experiential Meal.” By now, you should be able to guess who was there first. As Sophie Brickman notes in The New Yorker: “The banquets and dinners that Marinetti lays out in The Futurist Cookbook [. . .] are as much little plays as they are feasts.” Elsewhere, it has been suggested that the Futurists were interested in “elevating the chef to the rank of sculptor, stage designer, and director of a performative event.” Just take the following account of a dinner hosted in Bologna: “the ‘culinary stratosphere’ [. . .] was filled with ‘nutritious noises’ of aeroplanes, complementing a mise-en-scène of food sculptures, inventive lighting effects, and amazing outfits for the waiters, designed by Depero.” Remarkably, this event was held on the evening of 12 December 1931. All this, then, leads us to our next question . . .

Futurist cooking: was molecular gastronomy invented in the 1930s?

It is the growing realization of just how many cutting-edge modernist food practices were actually first trialed by Marinetti and his colleagues that has led some to ask whether modernist cuisine really does have its roots back in the 1930s. There are, in fact, a surprising number of similarities between what was happening in northern Italy back then and what one sees in restaurants around the world today. Just take a look at the tenets of the “Futurist Manifesto” (see below), and then tell me that I am imagining things.

According to the Futurists, then, the perfect meal requires:

Originality and harmony in the table setting (crystal, china, decor) extending to the flavors and colors of the foods.
Absolute originality in the food.
The invention of appetizing food sculptures, whose original harmony of form and color feeds the eyes and excites the imagination before it tempts the lips.
The abolition of the knife and fork for eating food sculptures, which can give prelabial tactile pleasure.
The use of the art of perfumes to enhance tasting. Every dish must be preceded by a perfume which will be driven from the table with the help of electric fans.
The use of music limited to the intervals between courses so as not to distract the sensitivity of the tongue and palate but to help annul the last taste enjoyed by reestablishing gustatory virginity.
The abolition of speech-making and politics at the table.
The use in prescribed doses of poetry and music as surprise ingredients to accentuate the flavors of a given dish with their sensual intensity.
The rapid presentation, between courses, under the eyes and nostrils of the guests, of some dishes they will eat and others they will not, to increase their curiosity, surprise and imagination.
The creation of simultaneous and changing canapés which contain ten, twenty flavors to be tasted in a few seconds. In Futurist cooking these canapés have by analogy the same amplifying function that images have in literature. A given taste of something can sum up an entire area of life, the history of amorous passion or an entire voyage to the Far East.
A battery of scientific instruments in the kitchens: ozonizers to give liquids and foods the perfume of ozone; ultra-violet ray lamps (since many foods when irradiated with ultra-violet rays acquire active properties, become more assimilable, preventing rickets in young children, etc.); electrolyzers to decompose juices and extracts, etc. in such a way as to obtain from a known product a new product with new properties; colloidal mills to pulverize flours, dried fruits, drugs, etc.; atmospheric and vacuum stills; centrifugal autoclaves; dialyzers. The use of these appliances will have to be scientific, avoiding the typical error of cooking foods under steam pressure, which provokes the destruction of active substances (vitamins, etc.) because of the high temperatures. Chemical indicators will take into account the acidity and alkalinity of the sauces and serve to correct possible errors: too little salt, too much vinegar, too much pepper or too much sugar.

We have come across modernist chefs addressing pretty much every one of these issues in the preceding chapters. Indeed, the last point on the list sounds just like molecular gastronomy/modernist cuisine—call it what you will. While the names of the latest must-have kitchen gadgets have undoubtedly changed, the underlying idea is the same—science in the kitchen and the preservation of nutrients/flavor (one of the major selling points of the sous vide technique). I wonder what the Futurists would have made of sous vide, or, for that matter, the anti-griddle, popularized recently by chef Grant Achatz. This new modernist kitchen device can flash-freeze or semi-freeze any food that is placed on its chilled surface.

However, there are also some fundamental differences between what the Futurists were trying to achieve in Italy in the 1930s and what many of today’s modernist chefs have in mind. The former were certainly not much interested in making their food taste good; rather, they wanted to provoke, to shock people out of their comfort zone, to stop them reveling in the past (in their ossified cultural and political institutions, as some described it). Today, by contrast, the world’s most talented chefs are increasingly realizing that they need to control “the everything else” in order to deliver the most stimulating, the most memorable and hopefully the most enjoyable dining experiences. The aim nowadays is to prepare the best-tasting food possible and to complement that with the most immersive and engaging multisensory stimulation “off the plate” as well.

On reading about some of the Futurists’ crazier ideas, I am reminded of Albert Einstein’s quote: “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Just take, for example, the incendiary suggestion that pasta should be banned. Marinetti argued that it interfered with critical thinking due to its heaviness in the stomach. He also objected to the fact that it is “swallowed, not masticated.” Could you imagine a more provocative suggestion in Italy? It is funny, though, to read contemporary descriptions of Futurist dinners, even when presented by sympathetic chefs or journalists; the end result rarely sounds all that palatable. Just take the “Libyan Airplane” dessert: glazed chestnuts marinated in eau de Cologne followed by milk (don’t tell me, you’re not hungry), served atop a pâté of apples, bananas, dates and sweet peas in the form of an airplane—the Futurists, after all, loved their machines (note the steam engine on the wall in Figure 13.1).

There are other differences beyond the Futurists’ lack of interest in how the food actually tasted. Marinetti had in mind a future where the calorific requirements of the populace would be met by pills and powders, giving the body “the calories it needs as quickly as possible.” His idea was that once the basic nutrition was taken care of, this would free up time for “novel experiences for the mouth and tongue, as well as for the fingers, nose and ears.” The touch, sound and scent of the Futurists’ dishes were actually meant as substitutions for the nutritive function of food. Marinetti himself was clear on this point, describing the latter as “a dish I would not recommend for the hungry.” By contrast, the modernist chef’s food is designed to satisfy their guests’ hunger, as well as to look good on the plate (i.e., feeding their mind). Though those who remember the heyday of nouvelle cuisine might disagree.

Figure 13.1. A Futurist banquet in Tunis, c.1931. I must say that the diners (including Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) himself, shown staring intently at the waiter) look much more conventionally attired than all that talk of textured jim-jams would have led one to believe.

Of course, even Marinetti’s ideas about the future of cuisine didn’t arise out of nowhere; rather, one needs to look to Apollinaire (another of the Futurists), who hosted a dinner in Paris in September 1912 (see Figure 13.2). He called this new style of cooking “gastro-astronomisme,” after the eighteenth-century astronomer Laval. One can already see this focus on feeding the mind: “In the true style of nouvelle cuisine, these proto-Futurist culinary innovators did not cook in order to fill the stomach but to satisfy the cravings of the mind. Their intention was to create works of art; therefore ‘it is better not to have any hunger when tasting these new dishes.’” This comment clearly prefigures Marinetti’s position, and yet it is the latter who remains the undisputed godfather of Futurism.

Fresh violettes without their stems seasoned with lemon juice

Monkfish cooked in eucalyptus

Rare sirloin steak seasoned with tobacco

Barded quail with licorice sauce

Salad seasoned with oil and marc (brandy)

Reblochon cheese seasoned with walnuts and nutmeg

Fruit

Figure 13.2. Menu from a proto-Futurist meal, Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Le Gastro-astronomisme ou la Cuisine Nouvelle” (1912–13). Notice the similarities with nouvelle cuisine (e.g., in the unusual combinations of ingredients). In his book Feast and Folly, Allen Weiss explicitly draws parallels with the contemporary cooking practices of a number of top French chefs, including such luminaries as Michel Bras, Pierre Gagnaire and Alain Hacquard.

Want to create your own Futurist party?

Here are my recommendations for those of you who want to go “off the beaten track” and create your very own Futurist party. Given that modernist chefs have taken so much of their inspiration from the Futurists, there is really no reason why you at home shouldn’t do the same. So, my top tips include:

Cover your dining table (and if you have enough, the walls too) in aluminum foil. This was an exciting new material at the time the Futurists were doing their thing, both futuristic and technological. (Though it might be difficult to create quite the same sense of wonder in your guests today using foil.)
The amuse bouche should probably consist of a dieting pill. Remember, Futurist food is all about feeding the mind, not the body.
Buy some atomizers and infuse small amounts of the herbs, spices or fruits that feature in your recipes in oil or water. Encourage your guests to spray before tasting the food, and encourage them to breathe deeply. Perhaps position a fan pointing toward the table and set it on full power. (I am assuming that you don’t have a jet propeller to hand.)
Use variously textured place mats, or else give everyone a few swatches of materials like sandpaper, velvet and silk. Encourage your guests to rub the full range of materials while eating/drinking to see whether it brings out something different for them in the tasting experience. If any of your guests turn up in a velvet smoking jacket or a silk dress, so much the better! (But that may just be a North Oxford thing.)
Between courses, why not put some Wagner on the music system and turn the volume up loud?
Create a really fragrant sauce in a pan, then bring it round the table suggestively wafting it under your guests’ nostrils before returning the pan to the kitchen untouched.
No need to bother with cutlery; simply encourage your guests to eat with their hands and/or burrow their faces into the dishes.
Get a selection of food colorings from the supermarket and mischievously add some to each and every one of the drinks you serve.
Make use of lashings of those crunchy silver balls used to decorate cakes. Symbolic of the machine age, these tasty cake toppings will be more palatable than the real ball-bearings that the Futurists used to stuff into their “Chicken Fiat” dish.
Make sure you play the appropriate nature sounds to accompany your dishes: the sounds of the sea for seafood, croaking frogs for frogs’ legs and mooing cows if you happen to be serving beef. Your guests may never look at a steak in quite the same way again . . .
And why not engage in a dash of sonic seasoning? Serve a bittersweet dish, something with dark chocolate or sweetened black coffee, perhaps. Then alternate between tinkling, high-pitched piano music and some low-pitched, brassy music and see whether the taste of the food you have prepared changes.
In terms of the food itself, I would go for straightforward nouvelle cuisine rather than full-on Futurist fare. And if any of your know-it-all guests query why they aren’t being offered “Drum Roll of Colonial Fish,” “Excited Pig” or “Clotted Blood Soup,” or tell you that they were especially looking forward to “Italian Breasts in the Sunshine,” just remind them that Futurist cuisine actually started with Apollinaire’s proto-Futurist banquet in Paris, back in 1912!
Whatever you do, don’t serve PASTA!

You’ll be sure to deliver a night to remember.

Looking forward to the future of food

As robot chefs become more popular (see “Digital Dining”), the question of who makes our food, and how, will increasingly come to the fore. Similarly, as a growing number of the world’s top chefs open multiple restaurants under their own brand name, the question we should all be asking ourselves is what, exactly, are we buying (buying into) when we go to these restaurants? In what sense have the dishes we order really been touched by the master’s hand? Of course, we all want consistency, something that is uniformly good; none of us wants to be disappointed by a dish that just isn’t up to scratch. And yet, if it were that simple, wouldn’t a robot or production line do a better job of producing a consistent outcome? It could even be programmed to imitate the movements and mannerisms of the star chef—but is that really what we want? Certainly, when we discover that our favorite restaurants are buying their food in pre-prepared, we somehow feel disappointed, cheated even. Worryingly, this is something that a growing number of the larger restaurant chains appear to be guilty of these days.

Tim Hayward, writing in the Financial Times, talks about the “cult of inconsistency.” His suggestion is that we should be celebrating variability in the delivery of the foods we eat, not denigrating it (because it shows that there really was a fallible human hand at work in the process of creation). And that, after all, is what we actually all want when we eat out, isn’t it? As one salmon smoker Hayward spoke to put it: “Why would I want to be ‘consistent?’ It’s an artisanal product and variation is part of that. It’s how people know it’s not mass-produced.”

So, as robot chefs and cocktail makers start to appear more frequently, what will we, as diners and drinkers, think? Our views concerning the preparation of food and drink might well change. Here, I am reminded of the Italian biscuit manufacturer who gives their bags of biscuits a natural, handmade feel (despite the fact that all of their products are created on a production line) by having one of the machines cut biscuits that are somewhat different in shape from all the rest. Put a couple of those unusually shaped biscuits in a bag and the consumer is likely to interpret this subtle cue to mean the product is “made by hand,” and perhaps enjoy the experience of eating them more as a result. That, at least, is the idea.

Will we still be so enthusiastic about the open kitchen concept in restaurants once the chef is robotic rather than human? At present, the new technology has novelty value for sure, but for how much longer? And there are a number of other emerging trends that may even presage the disappearance of the restaurant as we know it. Sounds unlikely? Crazy, even? And yet I believe that things may be slowly starting to move in that direction. There’s a new presence on the streets of a growing number of cities—the green and black delivery boxes of Deliveroo whizzing around on motorbikes and cycles.* Other companies have gone one stage further; for example, if you live in central London (i.e., Zone 1), Supper will deliver high-end Michelin-starred cuisine direct to your front door. So if, in the years to come, such home delivery services continue to grow at anything like the current pace (and the price comes down, as it always does), then the question on every restaurateur’s lips really ought to be: will people continue to go out to eat in restaurants? Why, after all, should they bother, when they can enjoy the same dishes in the comfort of their own homes? Presumably this is exactly the same issue that cropped up when the possibility of watching the latest movies at home, rather than at the cinema, first became a reality.

What, exactly, is lost if you take the restaurant away from the food? Well, as we have seen in earlier chapters, the fact that no crockery, cutlery or napkins are provided by the home delivery services is likely to diminish the at-home experience (assuming that the cutlery used in high-end restaurants is likely to be of better quality and heavier than what most of us use at home). So, if you are tempted to try out these services, my tip is to choose your plateware and cutlery carefully. It really can make all the difference. Oh, and—as you’ll know by now—be sure to get the music right too.

There has also been a recent push toward helping people to make their own food at home. A number of internet-based companies (think Blue Apron, HelloFresh and ChefSteps) now encourage people like you and me to make a chef-prepared recipe by sending you the ingredients in the right proportions and offering a step-by-step guide online on how to prepare the food. Should this trend continue, we might see more home chefs cooking healthier foods. These meals are likely to taste better too, given the Ikea effect we saw in “The Personalized Meal.”

Another pressure on the traditional restaurant format comes from all those creative chefs who are busily transforming dining into something more akin to a show. Sure, there is still food involved, but it is no longer necessarily the central focus of the experience. Think of it as modernist “eatertainment,” if you will. If you had been to one of chef Jozef Youssef’s “Gastrophysics” dinners in London in 2016, you would have heard the sound of a duck quacking, and then the duck being “terminated” (imagine the sound of a meat cleaver on a heavy wooden chopping board, complete with the cracking of cartilage and bone), all before the duck course comes out from the kitchen. As the chef puts it: “If [thinking about where their meal came from] makes the diner uncomfortable then they shouldn’t be eating this animal in the first place.” The most important thing here is to keep the diner entertained, but, beyond that, there can be a more serious aim, to nudge the diner toward making healthier, more sustainable food choices.

Already some of the language of dining is changing subtly; “diners” are gradually being replaced by “guests.” And what is more, you increasingly find yourself booking a ticket for the show, rather than a table for dinner (see “The Experiential Meal”). As these trends continue to develop, the restaurant as we know it may soon disappear, or at least evolve into quite a different kind of experience (think of all those coffee shops selling books that morph into bookshops selling coffee).

Big data and food

Looking forward, it is going to be interesting to see how big data and citizen science will change the design of the food experiences that we are all exposed to. We have already started to see linguists mining thousands of online menus to figure out how much we have to pay for each extra letter in a dish name on the menu—around six cents, apparently. And then there are computer scientists out there busily comparing recipes from around the world in order to discover key flavor pairings that are intimately associated with the cuisine of a particular place (or region), ushering in a new area of science, known as “computational gastronomy.” The latest analysis of Indian recipes, for instance, shows that the chefs there tend to combine ingredients that are not harmonized—exactly the opposite pattern to what is seen in the rest of the world.

What other genuine insights might emerge from this data-mining of large-scale food-relevant databases? Will a whole range of great-tasting but unusual new flavor combinations emerge from the likes of FoodPairing (who run a subscription website allowing chefs, cocktail makers and interested home chefs to figure out which combinations of ingredients share the same flavor compounds) and IBM’s Chef Watson? IBM’s supercomputer Watson algorithmically analyzes a database of thousands of recipes plus a database of flavor compounds found in thousands of ingredients, along with psychological findings about how people perceive different combinations of ingredients. This computer has no hands so merely comes up with unusual combinations that someone else makes: “IBM is keen to stress that this is not about machines outdoing humans but rather working side by side with them [. . .] Heston Blumenthal better watch out.” Will the diners of tomorrow be increasingly exposed to a whole range of new flavor combinations? The key point to remember here is that it is not about gastrophysicists competing against chefs, nor computers battling it out against humans. Rather, it is a question of how much more convincing a proposition we can make by bringing together the various disciplines. Meanwhile, researchers who surveyed over a million online restaurant reviews over a nine-year period from 2002 to 2011 across every state in the U.S. found that good weather tends to result in our enjoying the experience of dining out that much more than when the weather is not so good.

In the last few years, the Crossmodal Laboratory has been running a number of large-scale citizen-science experiments in museums and also online, to help provide information about the kind of design decisions that diners may appreciate: everything from assessing the orientation of the dish through to the wall color and the background music. My guess is that the small-scale studies of the effect of the environment on the behavior of diners (typically involving a few tens or hundreds of diners, as covered in “The Atmospheric Meal”) will soon be eclipsed by big-data studies (with the data perhaps acquired through the signals given off by diners’ mobile devices). The number of participants that one can study will suddenly jump to the tens or hundreds of thousands.

This should hopefully allow for much better evidence-based decision-making in the design of food and beverage offerings. As a case in point, over the last year we have collected responses from more than 50,000 people who attended the “Cravings” exhibition (either in person or online) while it was open to the public in London’s Science Museum. The results have helped confirm some of our intuitions regarding how the presentation of food affects what we think about the flavor and how much we expect to like a dish. At the same time, however, the results have started to disprove some kitchen folklore—such as, for example, that odd numbers of items are preferred over even numbers on the plate. We have recently extended this approach to look at the best orientation for a long straight element in a dish—think a seared spring onion, or a whole lobster. It turns out that people like linear elements to ascend from the bottom left to the top right. Another intriguing contrast that the latest research highlights is between the kinds of plating people will be willing to pay most for, and those they deem most creative.

One other example of what is currently being done with big data analysis comes from Rupert Naylor, of Applied Predictive Technologies. He describes what the company he works for does for the restaurant chain as allowing them to: “run control experiments, much in the same way that they test for the efficacy of new drugs [. . .] We do a control test on restaurants that show similar behavior as a baseline, then we strip out all the noise—the data that may have affected sales anyway—to get to the truth.” The approach apparently helped Pizza Hut U.K. to increase average customer spend from £9 to £11. While this might not sound like much, rest assured it soon adds up.

Synaesthetic experience design

Practitioners of multisensory experience design have, over many years, thoroughly explored those connections between the senses that are, in some sense, obvious. Just think of a dish of frogs’ legs accompanied by the sound of croaking frogs, or a seafood dish accompanied by the sounds of the sea. Other restaurants, including Eleven Madison Park in New York, Casamia in Bristol and Ultraviolet in Shanghai, have tried various ways to recreate a picnic (or, more likely, the positive emotions that are associated in most people’s minds with such events from their past): by using ceramic plates that imitate paper plates; by serving from a picnic basket, obviously; and probably by introducing the sounds, smells (scent of a field) and even associated visuals (think of a countryside scene). It is effective, most definitely, but it can seem a little clichéd, at least in hindsight. Increasingly, though, chefs, culinary artists and experience designers are starting to move more into the world of synaesthetic design, where decisions about the experiences that are delivered to diners (and drinkers) are based on connections between our senses that are not so obvious, or literal. Here, I am thinking of events like “The Colour Lab,” where ambient colors and music were used to alter the taste of a glass of wine. This is synaesthesia-like, in that the connections between the senses are often surprising when first you hear about them (e.g., that sweet is high-pitched, pinky-red and round). And yet this form of design is fundamentally different from synaesthesia (the condition where people see letters, numbers and units of time in color, say, or where sounds trigger smells). The key difference is that these newly discovered links between the senses tend to be shared between the majority of people. It is these common yet often surprising associations—what are often referred to as “crossmodal correspondences”—that allow for the creation of multisensory experiences that are both intriguing and truly meaningful. The growing body of gastrophysics research provides a number of insights for chefs and experience designers in this area.

Things begin to get really interesting, though, as soon as one starts playing with the correspondences as they relate to the chemical senses—that’s taste, aroma and flavor. This is not to say that adding more senses into the mix necessarily makes things easier as far as multisensory experience design is concerned. Just take Sean Rogg, talking about one of his recent events, part of the Waldorf Project, in which people were “invited to taste color.” The visitors, who had been asked to dress monochromatically for the event, got to drink fine wine and watch a host of dancers perform. According to the artist: “Not only did the soundscapes have to sound like their respective colors, but I was asking the sound designer to pair his soundscapes to wine.” That’s a big ask. Nevertheless, despite the inherent challenges associated with working in this area, what is clear is that there has been an explosion of interest in synaesthetic design involving food and drink.

There is no guarantee that different people will necessarily have the same reactions to such experiential events, but that is part of the fun. The rise in synaesthetic design, building on the surprising connections between the senses that we all share, goes hand in hand with the emergence of “sensploration,” the idea that consumers are increasingly curious to explore their own sensory world (or “sensorium”) and the hidden connections that can be found within each and every one of us. And while sensory marketing seemed once to be all about making money, it now feels much more about the delivery of shared (and shareable) multisensory experiences (or at least it should). For the culinary artist, it is as much about a journey of discovery. It is about exposing us all to the unusual, surprising, almost-synaesthetic connections between the senses. In fact, at least according to one recent report: “70 percent of United States-based Millennials now search for experiences that ‘promote their senses.’” There are various explanations for this. One intriguing suggestion is that they are hungry for immersive engaging experiences, and as one commentator put it: “As consumers grow evermore weary of constant digital bombardment, they seek out more authentic experiences to immerse themselves with a brand.” So, while the experience economy continues to influence so many aspects of the marketplace, and marketing communications, it is time to get ready, I think, for the next “sensory explosion” (as U.S. marketing professor Aradna Krishna called it in an industry briefing back in 2013).

Have you heard of the Gesamtkunstwerk?

Ultimately, then, we are slowly making our way toward the Gesamtkunstwerk, food as a total work of art, an installation, or experience, that engages all of the viewer’s senses (if “viewer” is still the right word). The term is associated with the German composer Wagner, so no wonder that he was the composer of choice at the Futurists’ dinner parties. In fact, it is hard to see how this objective of creating a work of art that stimulates all of the senses could ever be achieved without the involvement of food or drink.

The Gesamtkunstwerk, Futurism and various other artistic trends that were very much in vogue a century ago can all be linked, more or less directly, to the rise of the physiological aesthetic in turn-of-the-century Europe. At that time, artists, including famous painters such as Seurat, were convening with scientists in order to design more pleasing experiences based on the emerging neuroscientific understanding of the mind of the viewer. This interaction between the artists and the scientists undoubtedly led to a phenomenal wave of creativity, albeit one that ultimately fizzled out. The decline was probably due to the fact that it was the wrong science at the wrong time (brain science has undoubtedly come a long way in the intervening 120 years or so). And, as far as I can see, measuring brainwaves was never going to produce the information that the painters (and other artists) wanted to help them in the design of their compositions.

However, roll the clocks forward and we are now increasingly seeing the merging of culinary artistry with the behavioral or psychological sciences. This is encompassed within the new science of gastrophysics. And when combined with the latest in design and technology, this new collaboration promises to deliver a food future that is utterly unlike anything we have seen before—unlike, even, the wildest dreams and ideas of the Italian Futurists.

Looking forward to a healthy and sustainable food future

It is getting ever harder to think about the future of food without being conscious of the problem of climate change, the challenges associated with sustainability, and the rise of the mega-city. It is hard to say whether the solutions to sourcing our food in the future will come from vertical farming, lab-grown meat, increased entomophagy, or—heaven forbid—Soylent Green (a delicious green wafer advertised as containing high-energy plankton but actually secretly made of human remains). This dystopian prediction about the future of food came from Richard Fleischer’s movie of the same name, set in the year 2022.* But I passionately believe that whatever the future holds, we will stand a far greater chance of achieving our goals by exploring the interface between modernist culinary artistry as it meets the latest in technology and design. Ultimately, it is crucial to realize that changing behavior is not simply a matter of informing people of what is good for them or what is sustainable for the planet. Other strategies are needed to nudge people toward healthier and more sustainable food behaviors, approaches that are cognizant of the fact that our perception of food happens mostly in the mind, not in the mouth. My guess is that the notion of “food hacking” is one that we are all going to become much more familiar with in the future.

And from a more personal perspective, I believe that the future of gastrophysics holds fundamental challenges as well as many opportunities to really make a difference to the way many of us will interact with food in the years to come. I hope that some of the most exciting developments currently seen primarily in the high-end modernist restaurant will be scaled up for the masses; indeed, I am already seeing a huge increase in interest from a number of the world’s largest food and beverage companies. As ever more of our food behaviors are taking place or being facilitated online, that will open up a whole new world in terms of the big-data analysis of food trends and behaviors. Chris Young, founder of ChefSteps, predicted that their website would be helping more than a million people to cook better meals at home by the end of 2016. This kind of interaction will generate huge amounts of data that can be used to figure out how best to personalize and enhance our food perception and our behavior moving forward.

The scientific approach represented by the emerging field of gastrophysics will help quantify what really matters here, separating fact from fiction and intuition. Real progress will be made just as soon as more of us recognize that “pleasure is not only found in the mouth,” as chef Andoni Luis Aduriz put it, but also—mostly, in fact—in the mind. Actually, the chef is worth quoting at length here: “What it comes down to is: you don’t have to like something for you to enjoy it or, in other words, pleasure is not only found in the mouth. Predisposition, the ability to concentrate—the impulsive mechanisms of the brain—can completely modify the perception of something that, at first sight, would not even be considered food for humans. In the end, it isn’t only about eating; it’s also about discovering. We take advantage of the fact that we are always on the borderline between our conservative selves—the part that makes us creatures of habit, finding shelter and security in repetition—and our curious, and daring, selves, which seek pleasure in the unknown, in the vertigo we feel when we try something for the first time, in risk and the unpredictability.” And that, I think you will find, ladies and gentlemen, brings us right back to where we started! (See Figure 13.3.)

Figure 13.3. F. T. Marinetti gazing into the future.

And to end: how about something healthy?

To close this book, I have summarized some of the key recommendation for anyone who wants to feel more satisfied while consuming less (i.e., to eat more healthily):

Eat less—Obvious, I hear you say! But not everyone does it.
Hide food—you will be more tempted to snack if you can see the cookies in the jar than if they are in an opaque container. It really is a case of out of sight, out of mind. In fact, anything that you can do to make it more difficult to get your hands on food in the first place is likely to help too. This kind of nudge approach has often (not always, mind) been shown to be effective in helping reduce consumption.
Middle-aged and older adults should try drinking lots of water before every meal—half a liter thirty minutes before breakfast, lunch and dinner ought to do the trick. In one study, this led to a reduction in consumption at mealtimes of roughly forty calories. Plus all those extra bathroom breaks will no doubt help increase your physical activity!
If you happen to be fond of junk food, why not eat in front of a mirror, or else off a mirrored plate? Research suggests it can help reduce desire for, and consumption of, foods such as chocolate brownies. There is at least one famous actress who would apparently eat naked in front of a mirror. It would be interesting to see whether customers at those naked restaurants that have been popping up recently (see “Social Dining”) also eat less. Try to eat slowly and mindfully. And yes, that does mean turning the TV off!
The more food sensations you can muster, the better. Stronger aroma, more texture—it all helps your brain to decide when it has had enough. In one of my favorite studies illustrating this point, people consumed far more calories when drinking apple juice as compared to apple puree, and when eating pureed apple as compared to apples. Exactly the same food in all three cases; all that differs are the textural cues the brain receives about how much it has consumed (and how much chewing is needed). This is much the same reason why you should never use a straw to drink. It eliminates all the orthonasal olfactory cues that are normally such a large part of the enjoyment (see the “Smell” chapter). Be sure to inhale the aroma of your food frequently; after all, this is where the majority of the pleasure resides. Whatever you do, don’t drink iced water with your meals. It numbs the taste buds, plain and simple! Some researchers have even gone so far as to suggest that the North American preference for more highly sweetened foods may, in part, be linked to all the iced water they drink at mealtimes.
Eat from smaller plates. This technique is especially effective when people serve themselves. The numbers here are pretty staggering: if you eat from a plate that is twice as big, for example, you are likely to consume as much as 40% more food.
Bowl food—eat from a heavy bowl without a rim, and hold the bowl in your hands while you eat; don’t leave it sitting on the table. The weight in your hand is likely to trick your brain into thinking that you have consumed more, and you’ll feel satiated sooner.
Eat from red plateware. In this context, red plates seem to trigger some kind of avoidance motivation.
Eat with chopsticks rather than regular cutlery, or try eating with your non-dominant hand, or else with a smaller spoon or fork. Do anything, basically, that makes it more difficult for you to get the food into your mouth. Along much the same lines, artists and designers from thirty-five countries were recently tasked with making tableware that challenged eating norms and so encouraged slower, more mindful eating, at an Amsterdam supper club. Though you’d best watch your teeth if you ever try eating with the nail-filled spoon that one eager contributor created for the event.
Oh, and one excellent tip from Yogi Berra: “You better cut the pizza in four slices because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”