We need to talk about Food Design. What is it? Can it improve our relationships with food, individually and on a global scale, or is it just a grandiose term for decorative plating? Together with the Oxford Food Symposium’s Kitchen Table, The Common Table invited leading voices in Food & Design, Priya Mani, Sonia Massari, Fabio Parasecoli, Laila Snevele, and Sophie Lovell to a communal table moderated by our own Orlando Lovell.
For decades, we’ve had solutions from across the food world, from policy and production to education and economics. Yet despite all these efforts, many of our global and personal relationships with food remain fractured, unsustainable, inequitable and often disconnected. It’s clear that something is still missing. This is where Food Design has the potential to enter the conversation, not as a magic fix but as a radically different way of thinking and doing. It’s a field that can ask, what if we reimagined our food systems not just through function, but through empathy, creativity, and experience?
Though still emerging, Food Design began gaining recognition in the early 2000s through the work of designers such as Martí Guixé, who coined the term “Food Designer”. He treated food as a design material rather than just as a consumable. In parallel, movements like Slow Food in Italy helped highlight the political and cultural dimensions of eating. Not much later, design schools began exploring food as both a product and a process, culminating in courses such as Food Non Food, led by Marije Vogelzang at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. And in parallel, chefs, artists, and scientists increasingly blurred their disciplinary lines, creating this new field of Food Design that can be observed and practised in many different ways: the interesting aspect of Food Design is that it’s not confined to one practice.
What if we reimagined our food systems not just through function, but through empathy, creativity, and experience?
orlando lovell
All people have a relation to food, so Food Design can come not just from industrial design, architecture, biology, anthropology or marketing, but chefs, farmers and craftspeople as well. The following panel conversation with Sophie Lovell, Sonia Massari, Laila Snevele, Fabio Parasecoli, and Priya Mani, all of whom bring unique insights and experiences from across the food and design spectrum, explores this multidisciplinary field and unpacks various practices and approaches to Food Design, how we define the term and what the potentials of Food Design are and their scale of impact.
Orlando Lovell: What is Food Design?
Sophie Lovell: Of all the so-called design disciplines, I believe Food Design best represents the paradigm shift away from a harmful perception of objects as things with a disconnected, standalone existence. Food Design offers a journey away from extractive production and consumption towards a more connected, more relational, systems-based understanding of the world in which, when you pull on one thread, you move all the others. It’s hard to learn to work this way as a designer, or for anyone, really, because nothing’s ever finished or complete. Everything’s moving all the time. But if we think of and work with the material food and food systems from growing, harvesting, cooking, eating, composting, growing again, et cetera, it’s somehow easier to learn to design and think in a more relational way, the way natural systems or nature works.
So at a very basic level, Food Design is, or should be, about shifting human attitudes, from conquerors to custodians, through the medium of food, which is part of accepting that we too are just biomass in the great more-than-human recycle of life.
Food Design is, or should be, about shifting human attitudes, from conquerors to custodians, through the medium of food.
sophie lovell
Sonia Massari: I’ve been struggling with this question for almost 20 years until I started to ask instead: do we really need a definition, or do we maybe need to better understand what design is first, and how it can impact the food system? I always found Food Design to be a great common ground for listening to different voices and opinions.
I think we are very good at defining Food Design academically. I think we have amazing categories that we can apply, like Food Design as product design, Food Design meaning design for food, with food, with technological interaction. But we still have a disconnect with the people who work with food every single day. I’m talking about farmers, producers, chefs, researchers, and communities and what Food Design can do to change their work, their lives, their communities, their resilience, life, and so on. I want to bring design to the production, to the beginning of food, not to the endpoint of food, which is consumption.
We still have a disconnect with the people who work with food every single day … I want to bring design to the production, to the beginning of food, not to the endpoint of food, which is consumption.
sonia massari
Laila Snevele: That’s the interesting challenge with this design field. Somehow it’s still shaping, forming, defining itself. I think that for me, too, Food Design means personal development, which I don’t think I would have found in any other design field.
When Food Design enters the scene, it turns your world a little bit upside down. It shakes you a little bit. It also prompts you to ask interesting questions about yourself, which led me to define myself as a Sensory Food Designer. I think there’s an opportunity in this field for many artists, designers, thinkers, and so on, because it’s so big, so complex and still unformed.
Orlando Lovell: That’s interesting because I began to see Food Design as bridge-building between disciplines. That’s what makes it so hard to grasp because instead of defining our own space, we’re more in the interstitial space where the connections between specialities, cultures and people happen.
Fabio Parasecoli: As somebody who is not a designer, I think it helps to frame this question from a historical and a cultural point of view. I think Food Design so far has been the idea that you can apply design approaches, methods and theories to the food system in general.
I see Food Design as bridge-building between disciplines … we’re more in the interstitial space where the connections between specialities, cultures and people happen.
orlando lovell
At first, there was this idea that Food Design is just about how to plate something or about the objects on the table. But that perception was also connected with a very limited idea of design being mostly about products, graphics, or built environments. That has changed a lot over the years, and this is something that maybe non-designers might not be very aware of. We have had this transition in which design has been enriching and expanding. In the 80s, User Interaction Design appeared because we had to figure out how to make humans interact with computers. Then we start having other designers working with processes, services, and, finally, systems.
Around 20 years ago, as Sonia pointed out, design happened to meet food and food systems at a specific moment in which there was more awareness about food and what it means culturally, politically, environmentally and in terms of health. Many people not directly involved in food production began to rethink their role as consumers in many ways. This was a perfect moment for designers to start working on this food system, which was trying to understand what was wrong with it.
For me, Food Design is definitely not what’s on the plate. But if you are working on a plate (which is totally fine), you need to think about the implications of that plate. Where does the material come from? Who’s supposed to eat from it? Do they eat with their hands? Do they eat with chopsticks? Where does the eating happen? And where does the food that ends up on the plate come from? As a teacher, I try to help students to think systemically, even if they are focusing on one specific project, object, environment or experience.
As a teacher, I try to help students to think systemically, even if they are focusing on one specific project, object, environment or experience.
Fabio Parasecoli
Priya Mani: I’m trained as a designer. Craftsmanship, in terms of form, function and balance that we all talk about, as well as the purpose of use, is still key to me when I work with food. It helps me come back to essentialism, to looking at what is needed and how it fits into the larger cycle of life.
Food is meant to be ephemeral, so in that sense it is fundamentally different from other materials that we work with through design. But food as a system seems to be anything but ephemeral. We leave behind traces everywhere, and it has a huge carbon footprint. So it’s these contradictory ideas that I think I’m concerned about when I work with a brief related to food. Designing with food is more than a means, it’s about a vision from materiality to the immateriality of things.
Simplicity is so difficult to achieve with good old industrial design; it’s the holy grail. How do you get there? What do you keep and what do you take away? How do you answer the problem you’re trying to solve? Design is still about putting the human in the centre, about fulfilling basic needs. I think that’s where the principles of design can use food as a material. I don’t see Food Design itself as a discipline; it’s too limiting. It’s like saying furniture design or lighting design. At the end of the day, it has to fit into a built environment and work once it’s in people’s hands.
Designing with food is more than a means, it’s about a vision from materiality to the immateriality of things.
priya mani
Orlando Lovell: I always found there was a fine line, which is also a little bit problematic, in terms of what is Food Design and what is just a cultural thing that some people always do like a food habit or a tradition. As designers, I think we’re quite often taught to pick something up and make something from it. But that can also be seen as a form of cultural appropriation. Have any of you observed this in food and design in particular? And if so, what are your thoughts?
Priya Mani: This is a lurking danger in all forms of creativity, right? Food Design may not be any more vulnerable than anything else. Fashion has it all the time. Furniture has it. Reappropriation is everywhere. But maybe food is more acceptable as a vehicle for appropriation because the fusion of flavours and techniques is as old as human culture. Food is made to be shared; it’s about creating, giving and consuming. I think it becomes a problem, though, when people demand ownership of ideas that are not necessarily their own. That’s probably an issue that we can talk about because food is fundamentally about collective knowledge, knowledge passed down from one person to another.
Fabio Parasecoli: I like the idea of the grey zone, because it is complicated. For me, the answer to “What is Food Design?” relates to the political economy of design. A few years ago, I organised a panel where there were Hispanic chefs talking about what it means for somebody who’s Latino to launch a restaurant business in New York. They pointed out that, for instance, there might well be non-Latino people doing fusion or creative forms of food that somehow appropriate elements of Latino food culture, but for them, the main problem was the people, who are perhaps white and male, and maybe have more access to finance, and more visibility in the media because they happened go to school in the right places. If you look at the political economy, then you can see why certain communities might feel that parts of who they are can be appropriated for economic gain by the people who are in a much stronger position to do that. And I think that for me has become sort of the guiding light to see through the grey area that Priya was pointing out.
For me, the answer to “What is Food Design?” relates to the political economy of design.
fabio parasecoli
Orlando Lovell: This also relates to an understanding held by many that Food Design is about creating a marketable output. Is that where Food Design still is?
Sonia Massari: Design is always a political tool. Every time we create a cultural artefact, we’re going to impact and change things. But I’m applying design in less of a material or product sense and more in a participatory one. I’m working to help people get connected who were not connected before, and that’s why they needed design.
I think that food and design together have become “Food Design”. I’m not really a fan of putting the two words together, but here we are talking about it. Let’s instead say “food and design”.
When these two words, “food” and “design”, are put together, they can become an instrument that helps to connect the dots and find values. I’ve been working with groups of people that, without food and design, couldn’t work together through emotion, which is a language that everybody has. In this way, we were able to talk about food insecurity and other hot topics or taboo topics that you usually aren’t able to address by simply sitting and talking. I think if you use design well, it can really help a lot. Emotion is one of the tools we can use with food when we play with it.
At the beginning of Food Design, we were maybe using the term “play” incorrectly to create fancy and performative things. Nowadays, I think “play” with respect to food means using food as a language and seeing what you can do with it in terms of needs, equality and sustainability. Food is both a very powerful tool and a medium. As a medium, if used well, it’s a superpower.
Laila Snevele: I don’t usually set out to make something as a political statement, but it probably ends up working as one in some way. For me, Food Design is more of an interesting way to deliver stories – maybe as a service rather than a product.
For me, Food Design is more of an interesting way to deliver stories – maybe as a service rather than a product.
laila snevele
With sensory experiences, what we want to share or deliver is really important. The more senses that are involved in an experience, or in storytelling, the more memorable the story becomes. So it’s really important to understand how all these sensory inputs work. Often, we’re completely unaware of how small things like a sound or a smell can completely disrupt the messaging.
Orlando Lovell: I really appreciate your world of tactility and the senses. A lot of the work we do together at The Common Table is communicating through the barrier of text. Because we do a lot of interviews with people who work in food or food systems or Food Design and try to connect them, there’s no direct sensory experience as such.
Sophie Lovell: I’m drawn back to what Fabio said about cultural knowledge and sharing it, not just from the restaurant plate end, but from the agriculture and nature side as well. So much of what we are talking about relates to the designer thinking: What am I? What is my job? What’s my role? What’s my responsibility? Especially at a time when Western industrialised thinking is perhaps belatedly starting to realise that all those cultural practices its own system tried so hard to eradicate hold pretty much all the answers already to regenerative, custodial food systems.
I think one of the most important things to do, therefore, is to change the perception of the designer from one who comes up with the answers to one who’s asking questions – and questioning their own assumptions. That’s a large aspect of what we try to do through The Common Table. We’re lucky to get to interview all these experts and knowledge-holders whose practice, ideas and thinking are changing the system in some way. And we try to balance that macro/micro approach in their specialist areas as we go along. It’s only through exposure to all these different viewpoints, and being hungry for sharing, that we can really expand our horizons and grow as a discipline and community.
I think one of the most important things to do is to change the perception of the designer from one who comes up with the answers to one who’s asking questions – and questioning their own assumptions.
sophie lovell
Sonia Massari: We designed a meal with the president and students of our university to centre a discussion about food insecurity. We had different meals for the participants in anonymous white boxes: a hunger meal, an obesity meal, a sustainable meal, and a healthy meal. Guests never knew until the last minute what kind of food was in their box. So you could be at the same table next to someone with a full obesity meal, with a lot of food and sodas and so on, and your box could be quite empty. Then we asked the guests: How do you feel? How do you want to solve these problems? Do you feel comfortable sitting next to someone with a lot of food when you don’t have any? Some started sharing – finding solutions together, others did not.
That’s how strategies in Food Design help to bring people into a narrative that then helps to bring together opportunities. I don’t like to use the word “problems” in design. We use opportunities. How can we see opportunities and how can we use them to make new solutions?
You cannot provide solutions and expect people to apply them. You have to make people part of the process of co-design. This engagement becomes empowerment. When you have empowerment, you have change.
sonia massari
I want to mention something else that we didn’t give a term to, which is co-design, or collaborative design. When you design a service or a system, when you engage people, you work differently from designing an object. People tend to describe designers like heroes, with superpowers, who can do everything and change the world. I don’t think designers are the heroes. But what we are good at doing is making our users, making the people we work with heroes.
You cannot provide solutions and expect people to apply them. You have to let people be part of the process of co-design. This engagement becomes empowerment. When you have empowerment, you have change. And then they feel like heroes in making new equipment, in making new tools, in making new behaviours, in making new cultures.
I think our role is becoming more like a coach. I need to train people to be independent to push the innovation because I can help them to get the idea, but the execution and maintenance are the hardest part, and they are the ones that will do these things after I am gone.
Orlando Lovell: Something that I’ve always struggled with is this notion of the designer as the hero and that design thinking is when the designer comes and sees a problem, iterates multiple solutions and then presents the final solution, says, “Congratulations, use this and it’ll all be good”, and leaves. And then nobody knows how to use it, or it doesn’t fit culturally, or other aspects mean that it doesn’t work and doesn’t fully integrate.
Unlike Design Thinking, what Sophie and I call “Food Thinking” is more about problem moderation, bringing in methods and techniques and then using empathy and better questions to get to collaboration and common ground. This reminds me of where we started the conversation, saying that Food Design has grown in parallel to changes in the field of design and that a substantial group of people within the design community contest the tropes of the ego-driven “hero designer” or “iconic design” and are trying to work in a different way.
Unlike Design Thinking, what Sophie and I call “Food Thinking” is more about problem moderation, bringing in methods and techniques and using empathy and better questions to get to collaboration and common ground.
orlando lovell
Sophie Lovell: I think it could be helpful at this point to name a couple of examples of Food Design projects from the past couple of years that really exemplify this shift towards a more participatory, investigative approach we are talking about. Design duo Formafantasma’s Oltre Terra collaborative research, exhibition and book, for example, is a great investigative journey into transhumance, but it’s essentially about the human entanglement and codependency with sheep over millennia.
Then there is Cooking Sections, another duo who have initiated an ongoing, interdisciplinary, collaborative project called Climavore, which is exploring how the human diet can respond to the climate emergency. And another that I think is really beautiful and poetic is Superflux’s speculative project called Refuge for Resurgence, which took the symbolic language of food and community to set an interspecies dining table where each place setting – for a raven, a wolf, a snake, a woman, a rat, a child – and others – was different. It’s a project that makes the viewer question who gets a seat at the table. Notice that none of these food-related projects has single authorship or a product or end result as such. They are all collaborative and have reached a large international audience.
Priya Mani: What we are seeing happening in the food world is completely mirroring what’s happening in the design world, as in there is more strategic thinking, there is more systemic thinking. But I think one is not better than the other in the sense that there is still virtue and value in a good product, in a tangible product that solves an everyday need. Do we need another good-looking fork, a designer fork? Probably not. But then, do we need a dining tool or cutlery designed for geriatric care that brings dignity to eating? Yes.
It’s important to still iterate that products are not in any way a lesser or old-fashioned way of looking at design. It still makes sense as long as it’s meaningful. And I think that’s really where the role of a designer comes in, to ask if what we are designing is really a response to a genuine need, or is it yet another fad that we are reacting to. It’s really crucial that designers are being educated to understand the role of a product in the universe – the micro and the macro – and whether their design fulfils a fundamental need.
Sonia Massari: Ultimately, Food Designers need to work on three big problems: The first and obvious one is access to food for all, the second is getting credibility in the food sector, and being understood. And the third comes through teaching students that creativity is not an individual action; it’s a collective action.
The Oxford Food Symposium’s Kitchen Table, hosted by David Matchett, presents single-subject, hosted discussions, with all voices respected. Unlike the distance that comes with a keynote delivered from a lectern, these are informal, personal encounters around a table, to share ideas and spark constructive debate on issues that profoundly affect us all.
Orlando Lovell has been working within and on the outskirts of Food Design for many years. She studied “Food Non-food” at the Design Academy Eindhoven and developed and led the international Food Design platform, the Dutch Institute of Food and Design, together with Marije Vogelsang. She’s exhibited a number of her projects, such as The Politics of Cake, across Europe and continuously used food as a medium in her teaching practice. Together with her mother, Sophie Lovell, she is co-founder of The Common Table platform, as well as being the creative director of a global gastronomy group in Berlin, where she oversees various micro and macro decisions around food and design on an everyday basis.
Sophie Lovell is a writer, editor, and educator. As the former editor-in-chief of uncube magazine and the co-founder of The Common Table, with her daughter, Orlando Lovell, she explores how editorial platforms can create thoughtful dialogue around the intersections of design, architecture, and food systems. Her work often bridges various disciplines and brings together viewpoints, making her a vital voice in asking better questions about how we think about food as a medium for systemic change.
Priya Mani is a designer, food writer, and gastro-anthologist based in Copenhagen and works globally as under the name Cookalore. She has led numerous design and research projects on various aspects of food consumption, the culture of the pantry, as well as cooking and its impact on health. She is currently writing a visual encyclopedia of Indian foods and works as a flavour consultant for global brands.
Sonia Massari is a specialist in sustainable Food Design and education with many years of international experience across research, teaching, and consulting. She is currently a researcher at the University of Pisa in Italy, focusing on participatory design approaches for sustainable agri-food systems. She is also the co-founder of FORK, a global non-profit organisation dedicated to Food Design.
Fabio Parasecoli is a professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU Steinhardt and a former professor and director of food studies initiatives at the New School in NYC, where he launched the degree program in food studies. His research explores the politics of food, particularly in the realms of media, design, heritage, and international affairs.
Laila Snevele is a sensory Food Designer and the founder of the Food Design studio Sensoverse. She crafts multi-sensory experiences that explore how humans might eat, feel and connect with food in future contexts. From synesthetic taste installations to speculative dining rituals, Laila uses food as both a design material as well as a philosophical tool, inviting us to rethink consumption, perception and human relationships through experimental formats.
Title image: Laila Snevele @senseoverse
