Designs and wonders - experimental cuisine

IT MIGHT ONLY BE AUGUST, BUT FIVE months ahead of Burns Night, whisky company Glenmorangie is already planning its celebrations. Indeed, it has set itself a tall order to top its efforts for last January's party.

This was no ordinary supper: some dishes came in edible bowls; three kinds of fish were presented in hollowed-out eggs, each rubber-stamped with the first letter of its contents; cheese was served like paints in a child's palette; and every place setting was spot-lit with its own Anglepoise lamp. The food and arrangement were designed by Marije Vogelzang and traditional it was not. But then, Vogelzang is a new breed: neither a chef nor an interior designer, but a food designer.

"For us, Burns Night should be a celebration of gastronomy. It's not about throwing away the traditions of the event but reinventing it and taking it forward," says Nick Marshall, Glenmorangie's brand manager.

"After all, whisky at its best is a luxury product, so it should be associated with food at its most adventurous. As design comes to be regarded as a key element in every quality product, people are wanting to see that in the very food they eat – without it being all style and no substance."

There have been many changing fashions in food since 1945 – French nouvelle cuisine, Californian back-to-roots simplicity, European minimalism and, more recently, rustic maximalism have all been dominant trends in the restaurant industry – and there has been a crossover with art. Escoffier, after all, wanted to train as a sculptor before he became a chef. Food is "art that disappears", as Damien Hirst has put it.

More recently, ground-breaking restaurant interiors have become a draw for fashion-conscious diners. Take, for example, restaurateur Vinko Pepa's Mist, Antwerp's disposable restaurant, quickly constructed in vacant lots from basic materials and operating within a strict, fixed lifespan; or product designer Marti Guixe's Food Facility in Amsterdam, a kitchen-less restaurant that calls in food from all available takeaways in the area.

But the catering industry is now focusing not just on the environment in which you eat, but on the design of the food itself – for food to capture the creativity of fashion. The University of Reims has even launched a design culinaire course, its founder, Marc Bretillot, having trained not in the kitchen but as a furniture designer. The best produce is bought when it is in season – but it can only be a matter of time before seasonal collections are the norm. Certainly, fashion brands are tapping into the culinary world: arty Spanish confectioner Papabubble has designed sweets for promotional purposes, for the likes of Levi, Kenzo and Comme des Garçons. "People are appreciating the aesthetics of food. This has become an issue of fashion," says Papabubble's designer, Tommy Tang.

Camper, the Spanish shoe brand, went further with Foodball, its left-field food retail concept in which all meals would comprise portable, filled balls of compacted rice. "Food has become part of the leisure industry – people have more time and money and, as in fashion, are looking for new experiences," insists Miguel Fluxa, the company's head of diversification. "Globalisation means that they are also being exposed to new food ideas. But it was also important for us to do something new – there are too many versions of established ideas in the food market already."

Foodball might be a step too far, however; Camper is no longer working on the concept but does not rule out returning to it in the future.

Despite this setback, foodie pioneers are echoing the wild creativity of 17th-century chefs, who loved to experiment. And new possibilities are attracting the attention not only of chefs but established product designers. Foodstuffs are being considered a comestible that can be worked as any other material – more easily, in many instances – and there is an increasingly fervent exploration of the frontier where the aesthetic and taste of food meet. As the celebrity chef Jean-Christophe Novelli has stressed, "Cooking is about all the senses: touch, taste, smell and vision. The eyes are very important."

Certainly, world-class and experimental chefs such as El Bulli's Ferran Adria and The Fat Duck's Heston Blumenthal are establishing reputations for their "molecular gastronomy", pushing Michelin conventions of creativity by twisting received ideas of how food should taste and be presented – Blumenthal with his famed egg and bacon ice-cream and tea jelly, Adria with his two-metre long spaghetti made of Parmesan, oysters in spray form and carrot foam.

But such new forms of food are increasingly becoming accessible not just to those with the money for posh nosh; they are wending their way into supermarkets. New specialist creative agencies, and designers such as Vogelzang, Minale Maeda and Enivrance, are helping retailers in developing the new discipline of "imaginary foods", the latter for the likes of Nestlé, McDonald's and Lavazza, but less expectedly also for L'Oreal and LVMH. Maeda's challenging ideas have, for instance, included Japanese French fries made of rice, black milk and a burger that reminds the consumer of its animal origins. Flavoured twigs, chicken-style vegetable drumsticks, cereal eggs, double-headed lollipops, bound pages of spices to be torn out as needed, and "green" chocolate are among Enivrance's ideas.

"There is an awareness that, with so much happening in fashion, food is comparatively dull – despite the fact that food gives structure to our lives," says Edouard Malbois, head of Enivrance. "At the luxury level there is a need for experimental foods that stimulate all the senses and that can operate at the same level as fashion. But there is also a need for massive change at the everyday, mass-market level."

Making foods more entertaining has been the result of witty if largely superficial reworkings. It's a natural step on, for many leading industrial designers, from styling restaurant interiors or crockery: Paolo Ulian's Greediness Measure is a chocolate bar divided into numbered blocks; Marcia Nolte's Bread Goddesses are made by tying dough with string before baking, to create morphed rolls; Kuniko Maeda's Bento Interior is food as a doll's house; while Guixe's i-Cakes are cakes recreated as pie charts.

Yet the genuinely new ideas, those in food technology, respond to more far-reaching concerns about the way we live. "People want a more heightened experience from their everyday food; not just in more challenging foods and flavours but in the way it is presented," says Wayne Edwards, the director of food trends agency The Food People, which has helped to develop new lines for the likes of major food producers Grampian Country Foods, in Livingston, and Dawn Fresh and SeaFish, both based in Edinburgh. "Turning these new ideas into commercial reality isn't easy but the ideas filter down and even the most mainstream companies are having to consider the future shape of food because retailers are demanding more innovative ideas. Why? Because we get bored with products, including food, very quickly. We demand that they be entertaining."

But, Edwards adds, new food design is also about making it more convenient and accessible. People are trying to fit ever more into the same 24 hours and no longer eat at set times, so food needs to respond to that – hence Enivrance's vegetables or fruit reconstituted as aspic-like blocks for portable munching. Then, in the face of "globesity", there is the health imperative to get good foods to more people – fruits redesigned as chewy strips appeal to children because they seem more like sweets, for example. Healthier foods can be made more appealing through their look and functionality rather than boosting their sugar/salt content. But then other new temptations – grated ketchup and chocolate pasta, among recent proposals – may simply make some fatter.

"Food design is part of a grander social change. The level of consumption is becoming much more sophisticated," suggests Tamar Kasriel, of trend analysts Futureal. "Even milk comes in a multitude of premium varieties now. Food manufacturers have to keep innovating because consumers very quickly integrate anything new, and because we now use our choice of food and how we source it – within an acceptable budget – as an expression of our identity. We entertain at home more and so there is a status display through food, too."

A balance will need to be struck, though. For manufacturers and restaurants alike there remains the danger that some new food concepts will be too wacky for the average consumer – who, for instance, took up the offer to eat Marc Bretillot's curtain, stitched together from salami, displayed at Fresh Touch, an exhibition in Tokyo highlighting the latest in food design? Novelty can have maximum impact only once.

"I have had too many ambitiously conceived but ill-executed dishes," said critic Elizabeth David. And that was in the 1950s. Unless very carefully considered, food design may also come to be regarded as overly fussy – as witnessed by the backlash against nouvelle cuisine. Edwards, at The Food People, predicts a logical conclusion to the new food design: "At its extreme, you can envisage that those people who are not particularly interested in food will just be able to pop a pill."

That may seem a dystopian vision of dining, but in the meantime some new thinking has become essential. After all, just 20 years ago, the idea of flavoured water, sun-dried tomato strips and pre-washed salad would have seemed wacky. Today, many traditional foods will survive only if they are modernised, and food design is a rescue package for the food industry.

It needs ideas. According to Xavier Terlet, food market intelligence consultant to the bi-annual SIAL International Food Fair, being held this October in Paris, some 50 per cent of sales of mass-market foods today are of products that were unknown five years ago, but half of those new products that make it to the supermarket are pulled off the shelves within two years.

Restaurants and food and beverages face the same issues – and collaboration with a designer can add value to the experience they offer. Designs commissioned, such as those by Glenmorangie from Marije Vogelzang, have included colour-coded snacks, aiming to make them psychologically empowering in various ways, and strongly flavoured "emotion food", printed with phrases designed to elicit certain feelings.

"The skill in food design is to make people look at what may be very familiar to them in a new way," argues Vogelzang. "With a Burns Night supper, you want to keep the traditional ingredients but help encourage a new perception of them." She is perhaps the first of a new wave of designer names set to be cited by trendy foodies, just as the latest restaurants have come to replace high fashion labels as names to drop at dinner parties.

"It's about raising the consciousness of food," suggests Mario Minale, designer for Minale Maeda, who predicts a more mainstream focus on food design within just five years. "People are becoming more aware of nutrition, for one. But because food traditions have been so well maintained, its other qualities – shape, texture, colour, consistency, the qualities you value perhaps more so as a designer than your average cook – are under-explored. Food intersects with all culture, but it has become too much of a commodity, with little recognition of the different ways we consume it now and of how we want to consume it. All that's about to change."