Food designing

Even food, and the way we consume it, can be designed: Martí Guixé gives us a number of examples by squaring off potatoes, building molecular structures with olives and toothpicks, designing restaurants that use solar energy to cook food and creating artificial indoor fog using gin and tonic. This new edition, revised and expanded with 32 new pages and 40 new designs, documents 20 years of Martí Guixé’s work on food design, taking stock of his research from his earliest designs from 1995 to his most recent works from 2015.

Tradition, communication and culture come together in Martí Guixé’s designs and in their presentation in this book: the combination of the Catalan designer’s curiosity, irony and meticulousness deceive the eyes and stimulate reflections on food and its context. Who has the right of possession over the dish? At which point does the meal belong to the customer and not the restaurant? How can we break the cultural inertia that limits the way in which we eat? Somewhere between classification and gastronomic experimentation, Martí Guixé’s designs are more than anything else “reductions” of food ideas, solutions to adapt food to the reality of our time and to propose new ways of relating to food.

The volume is made up of three sections: the first is devoted entirely to photographs of different types of food taken all over the world by Martí Guixé and Inga Knölke; the second includes texts by Beppe Finessi, Octavi Rofes, Inga Knölke and Jeffrey Swartz, with a burst of questions and answers on the sizzling discipline of food design; the third is a complete repertoire of all of Martí Guixé’s food designs, with photography by Inga Knölke.