How Food and Design Interact | Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator at MoMa

actually the honor was all mine to be introduced by massimo who's a god a legend already and to be here with you there's nothing better than being in a conference where i don't know hardly anybody it's really a big pleasure and i'm here today to talk to you about food and design about what's cooking in design and what's designing in food but most of all i'm here to recommend to you never to let designers decide what you will eat because this is what you're gonna get designers lately are obsessed with how we will eat in the future they're so concerned about the shortage of food in the world that they're envisioning so much of what will happen and so much of it is catastrophic in their minds you all think or maybe not all of you but many think that design is cute chairs and you know graphics and maybe fonts but so many designers instead are thinking of scenarios for the future thinking of the consequences of the choice that we make today and in this case michael burton and michi konita have decided in the future we will have to rely on algae and of course we already are but seaweed will be the way to go and they're thinking of this kind of science fiction scenarios that will help us understand and survive the future or even worse hendrix this dutch designer is suggesting we shrink to two-thirds of our current size in order to really cope with how much we're consuming of the world's resources so it really is really a set of party poopers that we're dealing with in terms of design and so much so that they're thinking of how we can change our physiology and even start gestating endangered species this is ihasagawa who thinks of how we could actually gestate a dolphin as opposed to babies to human babies we should start thinking of species that are endangered right now even worse sometimes designers get so far as to reminding us before we even start eating of how much we have consumed already by choosing those pieces of the menu so i think designers really need you because if as julian reminded us before there are so many different scholars and chefs in the past that have talked about the difference between feeding and actually enjoying and about eating and actually it's just instead just getting nourishment designers need to have a little bit of levity and delight injected in what they do and to stop thinking of scenarios like this these are dan and raby the great designers from london that are the father and mother of critical design they're actually thinking of outsourced gastrointestinal systems that in the future will enable us to go back to digesting things we stop digesting millennia ago such as once again algae or roots or leaves from trees pretty sad a scenario for the future we're thinking of but i don't know how many of you are involved in the understanding of new theories such as the theory of the sixth extinction as uh as elizabeth colbert calls it in her recent book or the theory of the anthropocene that thinks of the fact that humans are really consuming too many resources and therefore are on the way to extinction but before we get to the way of extinction we're going to enjoy it as much as we can and we're going to try to replenish as many of the resources as we can but when designers think of food even though they are so sad they also try to get a lot of understanding and lessons from the way food is cooked and more and more designers are trying to cook their objects they're trying to do alchemy and chemical reactions in what they do you see it in the way so many objects are designed today i'm sure that all of you have heard of 3d printing which means changing a slur of plastics and hardening it through heat or light which is not that different from what we do when we cook for instance pasta or many other ingredients and you can tell how it's usually done with resins but some other designers like marcus kaiser try to do it instead of using resin using sand and the silica that is in sand that can become glass so he uses sand in the sahara desert and he concentrates sunbeams using the you know we used it as children the fresnel lens to burn the leaves and by doing so he makes beautiful vessels that look at the same time centuries old and done yesterday because they report the scanning of 3d printing but they are made of sand and glass or tomashley bertini that takes 45 000 bees and sets them on a scaffold made of cardboard so that they can make beautiful bases such as this this idea of growing this idea of making using nature of trying to understand new ways in which things can be generated by the rules that are intrinsic to them which is what we do when we take natural ingredients and we cook is more and more happening also because designers and scientists are coming together you see here a set of experiments that are from nanophysicists working with architects or chemists and biologists working with designers more and more it's about crystallizing new forms more and more is about learning from natural structure crystalline structures how buildings objects our environment even infrastructure can generate itself in a way that is at the same time natural and also new nature does it best we all know it you know when we look for the ingredients to make our best dishes we look for something that already is the best in nature and then we try to understand how to optimize those processes so they can generate something that is even more delightful and nature has done it best for millennia the work of mary oxman who is a great engineer and architect from mit is particularly important because she is trying to incorporate the way nature makes things into architecture in this case you see this pavilion that she built at the mit media lab in cambridge massachusetts the construction workers are actually silkworms silkworms that are applied to a structure that is set to light and temperature conditions that are optimal for the silk worms to build exactly that pavilion it's woven it's made by nature it's biodegradable it's a perfect structure that is also perfect for human beings and so on and so forth designers try to really really cook mushrooms seem to be one of the biggest obsessions together with silkworms for so many designers and in particular mushroom mycelium which is what mushrooms secrete that helps them attach themselves to trunks of trees the mycelium of mushroom is used by so many architects and designers to look for a new way to bind biobricks to make structures to actually make it so that a biodegradable binding element can be added to buildings and to chairs and to lamps and in this case this designer is actually thinking of a shroud in which dead corpses can be inserted so that they decompose more naturally fun huh i'm talking about really cheerful stuff today but there is cheerful stuff to be done because you see here one of the first examples of a structure that is built with bricks made of corn stalks that are kept together with mushroom mycelium and actually we have somebody in the audience audrey that has worked on this that has worked on this she has worked on this beautiful project that is currently at moma ps1 in long island city so really it's happening designers are cooking they're also cooking their own body elements you see here the work of christina agapakis and cecil tolas cecil in particular is a wonderful scent artist and designer and i am sure that so many of you would love to work with her she's based in berlin she distilled she uses science and she uses design to distill new types of scent and in this case christine and sister work together to make sorry to tell you human cheese which is cheese that is harvested using in part human milk and bacteria from armpits so you know it's like about a self-sufficiency for the future in fact it's called self-made so this kind of alchemy you know this is it's happening a lot and designers are actually talking about it and this is the work of two fabulous um italian designers that work in the netherlands uh one is from sicily one is from veneto they're called forma phantasma together and they have been doing so much of what you have also been doing looking to the roots of our culture looking to the way our gila and clay come together or looking for these natural resins that are make of straws and honey and beeswax and trying to teach other designers how to cook them literally there's a department store in milan called larina shente where they did this performance in which they had big pots and they were cooking pretty much like here we saw noodles being made they were making resin there and stirring it something that could never happen in in the united states there were fumes all over the place and people like you know throwing each other like boiling hot resin it was pretty fun so designers are cooking too but what i would like to really talk about is what massimo is actually hinting at every day every day foods basic foods that come from material culture from different parts of the world foods that no designer and no no new architect could ever improvise and i would like to link them to an idea of design you see here the ad sign this is something that we acquired in the collection of moma two years ago as an example of design why because it really answers all the questions that you ask of a great design it is old it is ancient the first time it was encountered was actually in medieval manuscripts the monks used it to abbreviate the latin preposition add which is in relationship with in direction and it's remained throughout the centuries used used by merchants to think of at the rate of quantity versus price used by accountants it was even in the typewriters in the united states at the end of the 19th century and it remained throughout history until in 1971 an electronic engineer ray tomlinson was working for a contractor for the government of the united states they were designing the internet and in particular he was in charge of the email program and he needed something to shrink the line of code of programming code that connected the name of the person to the name of the computer you see was the name name and then always the same command he looked at the keyboard of this teletype that he was using he saw this beautiful little thing did some research understood that it meant exactly what he needed connection adopted it and the first email that he said was about this sign so tradition and modernity old and new simplicity economy and also beauty because if you think about it beauty is in this piece is in this object and beauty is not something that costs more than ugliness beauty is a human right that is available to everybody and that's what we seek in design objects objects like this need to be isolated from their context for people to notice their beauty and since my job is to explain to as many people as possible the power of design and i try to do it with everything with the at sign with the post-it note with any simple things the paper clip why not food so i started thinking years ago of a book called design bites that would not be a recipe book but a design book that would talk about foods from all over the world and the foods would be divided in chapters there were design chapters so you would have a chapter with structural breads from all over the world so you know chapters about focaccia and matzo and nan and bami and tortilla everything that is flat and made from a mixture of a cereal of sorts with water maybe some leavening and then flat cooked or no leavening at all and that would then become structural in support for something else so you see pizza nutella vegemite whatever goes on the structural bread so this idea of really thinking of the world as a set of designed material cultures that generate foods that nobody else could generate that really are picked up generation after generation and transformed and metabolized into something new a chapter would be on rolls so you would have of course tortilla rolls and you know all of these different machi roles and uh and rugelach and no even though the uh ingredients are matter so much and the quality matters much it's more the way things are made that would actually be meaningful to these chapters we would get to this kind of concoction new materials such as a creme brulee or such as a pudding you know putting together certain very simple ingredients that create a new consistency that create a new way of eating the ingredients that by themselves would be so much less than the sum of their parts of course there would be a chapter on sushi and on all these layered ingredients and a chapter on iconic shapes you know from the croissant to the bagel and all their background if you think about it it's really about how things are made it's about not really you you would be giving wisdom to a wider audience for them to understand what design is about pasta indeed would deserve its own chapter and it would deserve its own its own chapter also because of the different relationships between different parts of the world also it's important to note that pasta cannot really be touched by designers i'm showing to you here two examples of colossal failures from the 1980s i understand that the 1980s the 1980s were extremely problematic for design i'm sure they were also for food if i remember correctly as an amateur eater but for design it was a real weird moment of celebrity designers that thought they could design anything like georgeto giugiaro who always designed cars all of a sudden he starts designing pasta for barilla it was actually put in production it was in the stores and nobody bought it why hello ask any italian woman or man and it would have told you or she would have told you that some parts would overcook and some others would undercook you know the overcooked part would be the lid that would be floppy like that while the doubled up part would be completely undercooked the same with jujaro this is even more absurd this kind of strange you know peace sign yin and yang sign with two side cannulas also that did not work at all it was a complete flop so in some cases these basic units of food cannot be touched by anybody but generations after generation and then pasta itself because of how diverse it is to accept different kinds of sources and to accept different kinds of preparation would be for a wide audience a wonderful example of how design is universal we're used to dividing design art food movies and keeping everything separate but if you think about it the act of taking materials that are available and elaborating them together in order to achieve something that as we said before is this is more than the sum of its parts is something that we all do so what is the difference between art and design we were discussing it before with massimo art is completely free from many bounds you know artists can choose whether to be responsible towards other human beings or not design much like the preparation of food until a certain extent has to respond to certain expectations you expect to not be poisoned first of all maybe you expect to be delighted and surprised you expect to have a relationship with the food that is prepared towards for you of affinity if anything else it's part of your system the same for design function used to be something really pragmatic today functions sometimes is emotion delight and surprise but it's still something that people expect from design so there are different degrees of design just like there are different degrees of food preparation but quality is something that we expect all the time and so is the presence of some sort of material culture or local culture you know the eternal argument about the birth of spaghetti and noodles is an example of saturn i would rather leave it to historians to really dissipate any kind of doubt but as far as we're concerned they exist together and they contribute to each other of course in the book you would get to more and more technical and synthetic kinds of foods and sometimes the category of snacks and cereals which i'm sure is to some of you a guilty pleasure and to other of you a blasphemy altogether is extremely interesting you know some of these technical foods we have in the collection of moma the jelly beans we have the m ms and we have the troupa troops and uh what else do we have in terms of foods and people ask me how do they get stored and said well you know we get we store it there and if they go bad we get the m ms again we make sure they are the original colors because you know there's been a lot of variations in the colors but one of the beauty about design objects is that something done today if it's the same manufacturer and it's the same process is an original right so we can keep on buying m ms and jelly beans so long as they're the right flavors so they are in the collection of moma because they are great examples of design as are well actually we don't have bars yet in the collection of moma but um when we did the story about humble masterpieces we had the mars bar because mr forrest mars was actually also the one that introduced the m ms into the united states having learned how to make that kind of chocolate coated chocolate in spain during the civil war so really interesting stories about them all and then foods on a stick kind of compositions of foods that are still quite connected to design all the way to just a few design designed foods food and designers is a little bit of a difficult topic because very often designers don't know how to prepare food sometimes they're good at collaborating with chefs and in this case martigliche is a good example he's from barcelona and actually he stopped designing food quite some time ago but he became well known in the 90s for his techno tapas they were not very techno they were just ways to distribute tapas so that they could be handled without having a whole dish and a whole preparation but i think i would stop there with the degree of design because i believe that truly in order to explain design to a white audience it's better to stick to what everybody knows so that they can understand design because they can also eat it and ultimately what we're all looking for is what we said before tradition and innovation something that comes from an antiquity that is in affinity with us as human beings but is that completely lively today something that is functional at the same time sublime something that gives us as the same time nourishment function but also delight and surprise thank you very much thank you