you are an acute and experienced observer of the world of food.
what are the changes you have been noticing in the last decade, and those that will be accelerated by the events of last year?
For some years now there has been a growing “mono-diversity.” This homogenization of eating habits does not follow a geographical pattern, but a social and cultural one. Geo relocation and travel do not push for a consumption of traditional food out of nostalgia, but tradition is consumed as an experiential recreation or cultural event. This traditional food is a forgery, built from a collective ideal that builds an artificial authenticity from audiovisual content on the internet.
High-level gastronomy, meanwhile, becomes experiential in the proportion in which it becomes banal.
In the supermarket, the food remains the same. Its packaging tries to be fresher, more sustainable and more communicative, but this is at the level of container and not of contents. There is no real change. I have sometimes seen an attempt to create a link between the consumer and the producer via smartphone, but this is still relatively anecdotal.
Allotments and individual gardens are a growing trend, but they are a toy; they are not effective in the sense that they do not allow self-sufficiency.
There are small artisan shops (some by ex-designers) that in a monothematic way allow you to buy high quality ingredients or prepared foods, but at high prices.
What will accelerate:
Restaurants are abandoning their classic format and new formats are appearing. Some will survive while others will be ephemeral. Delivery will be automated with self-driving vehicles and will normalize the fact that production (the kitchen) is not connected with consumption (the dining room), creating important changes in both areas, and therefore changes in both work and social habits.
Food production will become more artificial, but also healthier and more sustainable.
Plastic from fossil fuels will be removed from packaging, and the industry will stop imitating tradition and start making design-project-centered products integrating all aspects that make up an edible object, from a consumer-focused perspective.
is the impact of current changes homogeneous across geographies?
do you notice relevant similarities or differences?
The current changes are not geographically homogeneous, but socio-cultural.
They also follow generational patterns, regardless of geo-location. The Internet and social media unify trends and lifestyles across the globe.
Traditions are maintained by some kind of social or cultural malfunction, or by nostalgia that is acquired due to the impossibility of imagining a future, either individually or collectively.
in the last decade – and even more now – we have spent a large part of our lives in the digital dimension, and food appears to be one of the few real, tangible ‘experiences’ we have in a day.
we occasionally have meals delivered, yet we seem largely to be rediscovering homemade food, researching and connecting with – now more visible – producers, enhancing our interest in nutrition and health.
To quote myself: “The virtual world is increasingly important: we work and socialize online, we play video games, and we communicate via smartphones. Food is one of the few real things left, interacting with the physical body and working as a self-evaluation and self-reaffirmation accessory. Food will become our society’s most designed, desired and meaningful object.”
Due to current restrictions, we are forced to eat at home, and, therefore, to cook at home, something unusual for many of us. Eating at home involves buying the ingredients and cooking them.
This purchase being for personal consumption is more ecological and more political and its preparation depends on the culinary capabilities of each family unit, or on the possibilities of learning and household equipment. In any case, a home-cooked meal will never have the sensory level of one produced by a professional in the field of gastronomy, it will always be an approach, but it may be that it has a better political and ecological awareness, and that it is healthier.
The digital channel will make producers more localizable and accessible and will also make it easier to share images of our productions on social media, to reinforce our self-esteem and self-recognition.
are we changing what and how we eat?
Very slowly
what products and services would be appealing to us?
We find it attractive for food to be an object, designed according to parameters of the worlds of fashion and lifestyle (involving art and design). This is food for continuous consumption, with its own narrative, a narrative like that of a series, with seasons and ingredients that are developed as if they were characters.
This narrative could contain all the elements to establish a connection with the diner, and thus create loyalty. We are talking about a mental, rather than a sensory experience. It would be nice not to eat meat, but for the food not to be vegan. Meat will slowly come be perceived as tobacco is but will not be outlawed.
In restaurants: Cuisine will become something like a sect, with very closed group rituals and traditions and to satisfy the senses only. So personal chefs will increase but linked to people or groups with specific nutritional diets.
In food markets: It would be good for plastic packaging to disappear, and be replaced by eco-friendly and smart packs, which will incorporate technology through smartphone codes. It would also be good if the products inside the packaging were healthy. That the food is “local-Cosmopolitan”, but not Km0 and that the products do not follow the seasons (this does not make sense as products will be grown artificially) but seasonal trends.
In casual eateries it would be great if the act of eating became divorced from the context and its traditional forms. And the home kitchen will be freestyle, will not follow any rules, and in some cases could create trends on social media.
In general, it would be good for this new food to create a new “food elite,” and as a consequence new bodies and new brains with new ideologies for a new and different twenty-first century, better for all.
forced isolation, uncertainty and remote working seem to be keeping us more and more in our homes and our neighborhoods, away from centers. a number of us are moving out of cities.
we spend more time by ourselves, create new priorities, become more ‘independent’ and subjective.
how will this change the space we want to eat in – at home and in restaurants?
At home the food will be freestyle, and always a model or prototype of a desired reality, patterned on guides and internet videos. The space where we eat will be an equivalent, a false model, of the traditional: the restaurant or a radical casual home. The restaurant must offer a story or a narrative, and its food will be consumed for what it represents, the dining space will be unstructured (out of joint) and will occur in our perception, as normal or in contexts that are currently unimaginable.
how will physical channels of food-delivery – i.e., grocery shops – need to be re-thought?
According to forecasts, in several years everything that moves will be autonomous (self-driving) so the physical disconnection of preparation with consumption will be easier and cheaper, kitchen and dining room will be separated and thus migrate each in turn to more autonomous and different formats.
In the near future a kitchen or grocery shop could be centralized with the latest technologies, or an amateur network of chefs united and coordinated by an app or a kitchen on wheels that prepares food while transporting it.
We may need to redesign the postbox to receive and maintain food and its corresponding infrastructure.
how will public ‘spaces’ – the new sociality – need to be imagined to entice reluctant patrons in?
Public space becomes a space of transit, of displacement with areas appropriated, spontaneously or otherwise, for social use – selectively, never generally.
will domestic and commercial hospitality change?
Yes, domestic hospitality will be more intimate and commercial hospitality will become intuitive, integrating space, people and virtual applications.
will we need more ‘human touch?’ how much does ‘craft’ – in content and appearance – matter in a technological era?
As soon as AI looks more human, we will not need this real “human touch”.
Likewise, as soon as industry offers natural and healthy things, the idea of craft will not make sense, except as a nostalgic and traditional touch.
The concept of industry (democratization of consumer goods) will be constituted from the project of contemporary design and not of commercial or economic parameters. “Craft” will be “industrial” when the concept of “craft,” without losing its qualities (in this case its most important is empathy), becomes more widespread, and is more affordable for the public.
how have changes and current events affected you as a person/consumer and as an ex-designer?
The pandemic has had a profound effect on my work and personal life, especially in terms of mobility. Projects at European level have been stopped or postponed, as being physically present is sometimes necessary. The idea of Europe as a local market has been suspended for the time being, and everything has become ultra-local and less cosmopolitan.
has your approach to projects – selection and development – changed?
At the product level I have very interesting and contemporary projects, but I can’t find suitable companies to carry them out, not because of a technical or economic issue, but rather because of a brand attitude.
Companies are becoming more sensitive towards ecological and environmental issues, which is a good thing.
I have been developing the speculative food design project for over twenty years, and it is now, in 2021, that I see the possibility of putting these ideas on the market through companies or food brands.
On an interior design level, everything that is retail is digitized, so the spaces will be used to create complicities and stimuli in relation to the brand, and not for the sale of a product. The virtual world will host everything functional and the real world will just be empathetic. The real and the virtual finding way to complement each other will welcome and shape the new society.